Skip to content

Standard Reader

Tag

This Year

Articles and publications tagged This Year across the Atmosphere.

186articles1publication

Articles

Publications

MiscellanyJul 22, 2026

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...

MiscellanyJul 21, 2026

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?

MiscellanyJul 20, 2026

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...

MiscellanyJul 19, 2026

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...

MiscellanyJul 18, 2026

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...

MiscellanyJul 17, 2026

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 ...

MiscellanyJul 16, 2026

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...

MiscellanyJul 15, 2026

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.

MiscellanyJul 14, 2026

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...

MiscellanyJul 13, 2026

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...

MiscellanyJul 12, 2026

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...

MiscellanyJul 11, 2026

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...

MiscellanyJul 9, 2026

July 9 - Wild Sage

An interesting, although perhaps inevitable - thing about this album full of songs about loneliness: they're all first person. John's songs tend to be first person anyway, especially the ones that are to a degree autobiographical, but it strikes me listening to this one that it would be even more difficult to write a second person song about loneliness. Because caring about someone enough to observe their loneliness usually means they aren't alone any more. Some manage it: Ben Folds' Fred Jones ...

MiscellanyJul 8, 2026

July 8 - Songs for Lonely Giants

After several days of solitude songs where the loneliness was the absence of a specific other, we come back to one where the absence is of... everyone. Alone not in the crowd but in its absence. It's impossible to say if this is a better or worse loneliness but it is markedly and remarkable different. In one the absence is concentrated to a human shape, or a human-shaped gap where someone isn't. Here, the absence is like a field, encompassing all There's a sense in which this feels more natural....

MiscellanyJul 7, 2026

July 7 - Woke Up New

This song is a joyous whisper, a small delight that revels in its own quiet guilt. It's a song - as most of Get Lonely is - about absence, but it's a song that carried its own guilt. Not guilt for what the narrator has done, but distinct guilt for how the narrator feels. The core of this is the ambiguity of its central message. Free, lonely, scared. What do I do without you? How can the mundane feel so alien? It is, crucially, not quite a lament. The narrator is sad and confused, but not despair...

MiscellanyJul 6, 2026

July 6 - Moon Over Goldsboro

This is a lush dark landscape of a song. It reminded me of some of the early Mountain Goats songs, which was appropriate, as this album seems to be revisiting the places in retrospect that the early songs were experiencing as they happened. Fictional but not less real. This is a ghost story. Every song about loneliness is a ghost story. Every song about guilt is a ghost story. We're haunted by places not being what they were, people still being there in a sense and being gone in every other sens...

MiscellanyJul 5, 2026

July 5 - Get Lonely

We reach the album's title track, and every word of it is a body blow. It's a day to day itinerary of things being done by someone who is alone in the sense of without one particular person. And I've mentioned it before on here but there was a period of my life where that was me. Several periods, actually, if I think about it. I'm not really counting the ones where I was alone because there wasn't anyone there yet. That's honestly standard for somewhat neurodivergent young people without particu...

MiscellanyJul 4, 2026

July 4 - Half Dead

Our tour of loneliness takes us somewhere quite specific this time: the loneliness not of being alone but of being without one person in particular. And, John being John, it does so in the most jaunty, breathy way possible. There's a curse: life goes on. We can't help it, we don't really have any control over it apart from the obvious, but the wheel keeps turning even when it shouldn't. This isn't a new phenomenon, and some of the best art in the world has come about as a result of this. Auden's...

MiscellanyJul 3, 2026

July 3 - Maybe Sprout Wings

For a summer day this is a cold song, cold and sitting in empty and foggy space. What I get from this song is the ghosts of trauma. Voices in dreams that aren't really there and don't say what they said. Memories given form and distorted through the process. Those moments before dawn where the membrane between what you dreamed and what you think is at its thinnest. There's someone I wake up with a lot who has a superstition, and when someone you love has a superstition, so do you. If they have a...

MiscellanyJul 2, 2026

July 2 - If You See Light

After an album of deeply personal songs where the identity of the I was known, it's interesting to get to a series of Mountain Goats songs from points of view that are more distant, more fictional, or otherwise exploring new ideas. John is nothing if not a sucker for a concept album, and when the concept changes sometimes it changes. This is a song about solitude, but a different kind of solitude from a lot of the rest of this album. It's solitude when you are kept apart from others by circumsta...

MiscellanyJul 1, 2026

July 1 - Ox Baker Triumphant

Second half of the year begins here. This is a cheerful song about a villain, which is always nice to hear. I don't have much for this one today, even through this is a song about a pro wrestler and thus very in my wheelhouse. I've had a combination of time off work, not enough sleep, and stupidly hot weather. I'm coming back to myself and it takes time. Hope that's OK.

MiscellanyJun 30, 2026

June 30 - Going Invisible

The revisiting of demos is one of my favourite parts about the late month in This Year. Rarities, strange versions of things, small pieces of nearly forgotten art, and amongst them we have this: a song that is so perfect in its simple version that any studio version would feel like a downgrade. I never worry about feeling like a background figure. In fact, when it happens I usually welcome it. There's something worthwhile about not having to be the centre of the conversation, to working unseen, ...

MiscellanyJun 29, 2026

June 29 - Keeping House

Before I get into the lyrics I just want to delight in the gorgeous, sumptuous orchestration of this track, which starts and frenetic jangling guitars and grows to a joy of brass. And then we come to a fast upbeat set of lyrics about the futility of running from the past and the necessity of trying. Everything you try and leave behind comes with you. Everything you do to tidy up after the past just leaves more clean space for memory to track muddy footprints into you. The ghost on your doorstep ...

MiscellanyJun 28, 2026

June 28 - Attention All Pickpockets

It's interesting to move away from the Sunset Tree and towards something that feels a lot fuzzier around the edges, albeit on a number of related subjects. This is a song about change and how we cope with it or don't cope with it, and the realisation that the past really did happen to someone else, even if bits of that someone else are still here. And you can't change this. The past happened, and a version of you was there and you have the memories, and some of those still feel like they happene...