The Mountain Goats Rock & Indie 8 Items

Originally released in October 2000, The C...

"Transcendental Youth is full of songs about people who madly, stupidly, blessedly won't stop surviving, no matter who gives up on them. I can report that it is a very good album and has many more instruments on it than his early cassette tapes, including Peter Hughes on bass, Jon Wurster on drums, and, for the first time, a full horn section. And all of this makes a very joyous noise." - John Hodgman

The Mountain Goats are a trio from the mid-Atlantic and points north, helmed by John Darnielle ("one of America's most startling lyricist/poets" _Boston Herald) and kept honest by Peter Hughes and Jon Wurster. Though the Mountain Goats have been making records since the battle of Little Big Horn, All Eternals Deck is their third following the ratification by unanimous vote of their trio lineup (the bill, known as the Jon Wurster Mountain Goats Drummer Act of 2007, passed 2-0 with zero abstentions).Having taken to the open road as soon as the act was signed into law and consolidated their powers into a focused triune weapon, the three spent 2010 making commando raids on studios up the seaboard from Tampa to Boston, recording along the way with producers John Congleton, Brandon Eggleston, Erik Rutan and Scott Solter. Gravitating toward images and stories of doomed people or tribes trying to leave a scratch mark or two on some visible surface before their brief moment in the sun has slipped by forever, All Eternals Deck continues Darnielle's career-long quest to find hard-won moments of joy in the momentary resolve of people who have recognized, in the glare of a train's oncoming head lamp, their fate.

When the Mountain Goats got together in March 2020, it was to make not one album, but two. The idea was to again work with Matt Ross-Spang, the dashing Memphis wunderkind. Matt pitched we spend a week at Sam Phillips Recording, his home base in Memphis, followed by another at the storied Fame Recording Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, a plan that dovetailed nicely with John's notion of corralling these songs into two complementary batches: one light, one dark. The Memphis album_Getting Into Knives, would be brighter, bolder, marked by rich and vibrant hues; the Muscle Shoals album _ Dark in Here, is quieter, smokier, but more deeply textured and intense. We were all aware of the mythos surrounding Fame. The second you step inside you transport to its early '60s heyday and its louche mid-'70s denouement. The room we set up in is the room where Percy Sledge sang "When a Man Loves a Woman" and where Aretha Franklin recorded "I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)." The Wurlitzer with which Spooner Oldham opens the last? It's sitting right there. Spooner is living musical history, having played with everyone from Bob Dylan and Neil Young to Linda Ronstadt and Liberace, for crying out loud. And Spooner is all over Dark in Here_any time you hear a bit of Hammond organ or electric piano chiming in without repeating a phrase. We tracked the album's one outright banger, "The Destruction of the Kola Superdeep Borehole Tower," live with Spooner, and "Mobile" and "Dark in Here" with guitarist Will McFarlane_another local veteran who played with Bonnie Raitt for years. We only had Spooner for two afternoons, though, and Will for just one. After it was just the four of us: John playing acoustic guitar and occasional piano, the rhythm section of drummer Jon Wurster and myself, and our jack-of-all-trades Matt Douglas picking up everything else. The result is something more stripped down and intimate than the lush arrangements of Getting Into Knives. Of "The Slow Parts on Death Metal Albums," John concedes that the song is autobiographical. While the lines, "In a new universe / trying to find the mask that fits me" would take on a newly literal connotation in the weeks to come, the song is about going to late `80s metal shows at Fender's Ballroom in Long Beach, and about seeking a sense of identity and community in strange and occasionally forbidding places. This theme _ feeling at once conspicuous and invisible, the frustrated craving for acceptance _ is echoed elsewhere. Then there are elegies to lost causes, some big and institutional ("The Destruction of the Kola Superdeep Borehole Tower"), some small and personal ("Arguing With the Ghost of Peter Laughner About His Coney Island Baby Review," a tribute to David Berman, whose return from self-imposed musical exile had been cause for huge celebration in our camp). "Before I Got There" neglects to identify its victims, or the tragedy that's befallen them. John writes in the liner notes that "if you're looking for a governing theme here, it's calamity, as all the songs are either anticipating one or reflecting one that's already happened." - Peter Hughes, Rochester, March 2021

A surprise cassette released April 2020, Songs for Pierre Chuvin is the Mountain Goats' first all-boombox album since 2002's All Hail West Texas. After selling over 4000 cassettes in a matter of minutes, the avid Mountain Goats fanbase has demanded more and Merge is happy to acquiesce. "Recording on the same boombox that launched his career, John Darnielle returns to his lo-fi roots for an album of alienation, ancient pagans, and making it through the year together." _Pitchfork / "Full of images fit for these dismal times and slogans suited to surviving them, Pierre Chuvin is an inspiring reminder of how much each of us has left to learn." _npr / "Songs for Pierre Chuvin is exactly what we've come to expect: big-hearted songs full of warmth and smarts, custom-built to comfort and to inspire." _Bandcamp

On the first of March, 2020, John Darnielle, Peter Hughes, Matt Douglas, and Jon Wurster, aka the Mountain Goats band, visited legendary studio Sam Phillips Recording in Memphis, TN. Darnielle armed his band with new songs and reunited with producer Matt Ross-Spang who engineered last year's In League with Dragons. In the same room where the Cramps tracked their 1980 debut album, the Mountain Goats spent a week capturing the magic of a band at the top of its game. The result is Getting Into Knives, the perfect album for the millions of us who have spent many idle hours contemplating whether we ought to be honest with ourselves and just get massively into knives.