The next three albums in my Mountain
Goats collection, consecutively released,
serve as a tidy little trilogy. Unrelated to
each other, but I’m guessing each deeply
personal to the lyricist, we have three
concept albums in a row, albums that
aren’t narrative necessarily, but all revolve
quite specifically and rigorously around
a single subject matter. Not because of
this alone, but because John Darnielle
had reached a kind of pinnacle of song
writing skill, these are three of my
favorite albums by The Mountain Goats,
rivaled only by the most recent one.
We’ll get to that later.
Beat The Champ
I have childhood or preteen memories
of watching local professional wrestling
every week on one of the four channels
we had to choose from on our Sony 13″
television. I was highly entertained and
excited by the theatrics and the fake
fighting and the wrestlers who all adopted
these ridiculous personas to wow and
titillate and enrage the viewer. We knew
it was pretend, but we loved the way
it made us feel, rooting for the good guy
and jeering at the villain. For an album
about wrestlers, as this one is, Beat The
Champ is an exquisitely beautiful record.
Check out the woodwinds and piano
and heartbreaking lyrics on the opening
track, Southwestern Territory, or the
extended piano bit in the last half of
“Heel Turn 2.” There are also rockers,
upbeat pop tunes, and funny ones:
“I’m gonna stab you in the eye with a
foreign object” is a standout.
Many of these tunes
are in the point of view of famous
wrestlers, or about the wrestlers from
a third person p.o.v., while some are
in the point of view of the kid
watching the wrestlers, but, according
to the Mighty Wiki, John Darnielle
has indicated that wresting might be
a kind of metaphor, that the tunes
are really just about living through
difficult shit. Appropriate, I think.
This is a great album, by the way.
Goths
My first album by The Mountain Goats
still stands out to me as the favorite.
Darnielle is only a few years younger
than I am–was a child of the 70’s
and a teenager in the 80’s–and was
keenly (I imagine) aware and fascinated
with the darker side of the new wave
movement, the musicians and music fans
who wore all black all the time, clunky
boots, leather jackets, dark, ripped up
hosiery, scary eye make up, over-exaggerated
red or black lipstick, and hair that was
teased to stand up every which way.
The music was gloomy, heavy, and dark.
Oddly, the music on this album, a tribute
to and an imaginative exploration of
an aging Goth population, is far from
gloomy, heavy, or dark. Nearly every tune
on this album makes me happy.
The tune that almost immediately
sealed my love for The Mountain Goats
was “Andrew Eldritch is Moving Back to
Leeds,” a biographical imagining about The
Sister’s of Mercy lead singer, who, for
a number of fictitious reasons, is moving
back to Leeds. A more jaunty, cheerful,
toe-tapping song about a goth musician
you will find absolutely nowhere.
So much of this album
has that same, wonderful, jubilant
vibe–even the darker ones, of which
there are not many. And sonically,
the recording is rich with horns,
woodwinds, strings, keyboards,
Jon Wursters tight and jazzy drumming,
and John Darnielle’s best singing.
It is a snappy, clean, clear, crisply
produced album. And these lyrics.
I could likely write a little essay
on every single one of these tunes.
Maybe I’ll save that for my someday
submission to the 33 and 1/3 book series.
Goths stands out for me as one of
my favorite albums of the last decade.
In League with Giants
I have never played and never wanted
to play Dungeons and Dragons. And yet,
here’s an entire album, ostensibly, about
the role play game, or people who have played
the game, or images related to the game,
or stories that somehow are metaphors
around the game. I mean, I just listened
to this album closely, paying attention
as I did carefully to the words, and
partially because I know nothing about
Dungeons and Dragons, except in the few
cases where it was explicit and obvious,
I come away none the wiser about the RPG.
What I can tell you is that this is the most
consistently subdued Mountain Goats album
from start to finish in my entire collection.
It’s The easy-listening Mountain Goats.
It goes down super smooth, is pleasant
to listen to, and Darnielle’s voice rarely
goes to that place where one inclined
to do so might find his voice grating or
annoying. That easiness, that comfort,
is partly why I love this record, and even
though it is not nearly as hooky or as
melodically memorable as the previous
two albums, it stands apart and distinguishes
itself with a very cool, contemplative vibe.
Postscript:
Today marks the very first day in this entire
record listening process that I have ever
cheated and substituted a digital version,
either on CD or in a music listening app,
for the vinyl version of the record. I sat
outside in a lovely cool July 5th evening
with headphones and I listened to In League
with Dragons via my downloaded library on
Apple Music. Yes, I wanted to enjoy the
beautiful evening and continue listening
to music, but I was also compelled by recent
frustration with my turntable, the stylus
for which is starting to pick up dirt and fuzz
and is not wanting to let it go, resulting in
distorted playback, interruptions to the music
in order to clean the record again or brush
the stylus. I even went so far as to get a
pair of tweezers, and, using my magnifying
glass and being very careful, try to tweeze
the offending hair still lingering on the
needle. Super frustrating, let me tell you.
I must say that, at this point, having experienced
this same ugliness repeatedly over the last
few weeks of listening, I am about to do
something desperate. I started today with
a little bit of a cheat. I’m not sure what’s next.
Do I need another new stylus already?
Do I need one of those fancy record cleaners?
Do I need some of that goo that sucks dirt from the needle?
Do I need a new turntable?
Notes on the vinyl editions:
- Beat the Champ, Merge Records, 2015, heavyweight double black vinyl, mastered at 45 RPM.
- Goths, Merge Records, 2017, heavyweight double black vinyl, mastered at 45 RPM.
- In League With Dragons, 2019, heavyweight double black vinyl.
In case you don’t already know: I’m listening to almost everything in my vinyl collection, A to Z, and writing at least one, sometimes two or three long skinny poem-like-things in response for each artist, and on a few occasions, writing a long skinny poem-like-thing in response to more than one artist. As a poet and a student of poetry, I understand that these things look like poems, but they don’t really sound much like poetry, hence, I call them “poem-like-things.” I’ll admit that they’re just long, skinny essays that veer every now and then into the poetic or lyric.
michael jarmer 