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July 22 - So Desperate

Back to heresy again for a while. What's interesting is that if you'd played this song to me without me seeing the cover and asked me to guess what album it was from, I would definitely have guessed The Sunset Tree. It has that album's sense of yearning, of need. It's often the case that different eras of the Mountain Goats leak into each other, either as early hints of what is to come, or references back to what came before. There's a song on Transcendental Youth that I'll talk about when we ge...

July 21 - Thank You Mario But Our Princess Is In Another Castle

Sometimes John Darnielle's songs are complex and multilayered, sometime beautiful in their simplicity. This is a sing about what it must feel like for Toad when mario shows up and kicks ass, what else is there to say?

July 20 - Mosquito Repellent

Most of the songs in This Year are Mountain Goats alone, or something calling itself Mountain Goats when it's John and miscellaneous other people. There aren't many (although there's a couple) that are full collaborations. The first thing to note about this song is how fucking great the guitar is. Kaki King isn't someone I had come across before, but now I'm going to have to go digging, which is what collaborations are for, after all. There is so much in this one guitar part, and so much more in...

July 19th - Satanic Messiah

It's tough to know where to start with this song. It's one you feel more than hear, and one you experience emotionally. I get hit by a wave of sad and happy nostalgia when I hear it, as if something had happened and it was right that it had happened, but that it meant that a status quo I was comfortable in was ending. One of the sad but also slightly comforting things about being raised outside of any religion is that I have no firsthand expectations of what prophesied times would be. Only cultu...

July 18th - Sarcofago Live

Appropriately for a track on Satanic Messiah this isn't a song about satan or anger or anything similar, but is instead a sing about a different kind of universal experience: the gig that is about to change your life. The room and the people where music is about to change things for you in the most profound way. I have a couple of candidates for this. One was my first gig. Therapy? at the Royal Court in Liverpool, nearly 32 years ago now. I was 16 and with a group of people I nervously and tenta...

July 17 - Wizard Buys A Hat

If you were to map out all of the Mountain Goats discography on a piece of paper, or a 3d display, or some other way of doing such an obviously absurd thing, and on that map or whatever you found Up The Wolves and then you found Training Montage, Wizard Buys A Hat would be the exact midpoint. Or it wouldn't. The visual metaphor is incoherent. Sorry. What I'm trying to say is that Character plots revenge is a genre in songs by John Darnielle, and at one end of that scale you have ...and knows it ...

July 16 - Heretic Pride

The title track of this album is a great short work of fiction about zealotry and faith and standing for what's right even when the world says you're wrong. It's also a great short work of fiction about why those things I just said aren't necessarily always positive. This is the story of a martyr, right up to the very moment of his martyrdom, where a number of truths will either be the case or not be the case. The heretical reckoning he is waiting for will (let's play the odds here) not be comin...

July 15 - Tianchi Lake

Well, I wrote an entire post for this and the blog ate it. Lost forever, like a sea monster in a Chinese lake.

July 14 - Sept 15 1983

Nobody writes a musical obituary like John Darnielle. He has a particular gift for the last moments, for the codas of lives that end up defining or describing them exactly. I'll admit to being unfamiliar with the work of Prince Far I before this, clearly my loss. But I'm aware from reading after hearing this of how important his faith was to him, and the most powerful part of this song when viewed through this lens is its consolation. This is not a lament. It's an act of coming to terms. This ha...

July 13 - In the Craters on the Moon

Paranoia has a sound. It's something close and noisy and dark and warm. It's too many things too close that you can't see until you bump into them. it's unexpected strings and a voice going from singing to screaming so slowly that you can't say exactly when the change happens. If Get Lonely was an album examining loneliness, this song is examining what happens when that loneliness is internal, where nobody can get close and survive, and what that does to you. When you've gone past the point wher...

July 12 - Autoclave

In the middle period of the Mountain Goats (and it's July, we're well into that) there are a couple of overarching themes that it's worth observing. The songs are more confessional biographically, but they're also often much more nakedly emotional whether what is being talked about is directly an incident from the songwriter's life or not. Early Mountain Goats had a tendency to hide behind poetry, to allude to horror and vulnerability and indeed enthusiasm and passion rather than addressing thes...

July 11 - Michael Myers Resplendent

All right, let's be heretics. This song could not be more different from the previous album. Huge, bombastic, drums like gunshots, soaring strings, and a narrative about the focal role of the killer in a slasher film. I love a good villain. And my definition of good villain is very particular. I love a character who moves the narrative, whose presence is the cause of action. I love seeing the motivation that means that the story is something instead of nothing. Sometimes that's revenge, sometime...