My good friend Geoff Klock dragged me to the Bowery Ballroom last night, to see a show by the Mountain Goats.
Before last night, I'd never heard a single song of theirs. It was an odd show, for a number of reasons. For one, the crowd was astonishingly reverential - by which I mean there was utter, terrifying silence for the quieter songs, and a mass, gleeful singalong for the rowdier ones. Geoff had informed me that Mr. Darnielle has some problems with his voice, so I'd been expecting some relatively hushed vocals. But we actually couldn't hear the words in six or seven songs, and we were standing in a prime spot, right behind the sound desk. Still, nobody seemed to mind. The show perked up for me when Franklin Bruno came on to play (splendid) keyboards on the last half-dozen or so songs. But overall it was hard to tell, from this one show (which Geoff assured me was atypical), why people might fall in love with this band.
Anyway, I came away with a couple of CDs to listen to (All Hail West Texas and Tallahassee): perhaps those will enlighten me!
9 comments:
FWIW, I have heard a lot of Mountain Goats, and I still don't understand at all why the fans are so hardcore.
Tallahassee is one of the best MG albums to begin with. However see america right is a very untypical Mountain Goats song.
You will hear All Hail West Texas (esp "Source Decay") and Tallahassee (esp "No Children") and then you will know.
Tallahassee was my first MG's album, and now I have something like 250 songs by them. Check out "No Children" and "Game Shows Touch Our Lives" especially.
Yeah, my iPod has 252 from 15 albums. Except for a few stray EPs I think that's pretty much the complete works.
HOLY LORD. find Going to georgia on Zopilote machine, and buy The Corner's Gambit and Sweden and Ghana and Nine Black Poppies. just get it over with now, you'll buy them anyway.
I was at that show, and it was great!
"Going to Georgia" is the oft-cited high-point, and deservedly so. I'd recommend you buy everything Tim Adams has (re)issued on 3 Beads of Sweat [http://www.3bos.com/]. I think one of those CDs must contain the fine "Chile De Arbol" Ajax 7" on it, which charmed me into becoming an MGs fan.
J.
I don't know, man... I still find it more annoying than anything.
get past his voice. after you do that, you will find that he's one of the best songwriters right now. He's fucking great
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