Alpha Going to Omega: The Mountain Goats

Alright, so I suppose that it was sort of inevitable, as their's is the only band that seems to merit a special source folder in my iTunes library but honestly, I didn't want to do this. I didn't want to waste everyone's time waxing and waning poetic. I didn't want to argue something about which you have undoubtedly already come to a staunch conclusion. I didn't want to test your patience.

But I don't know if I can stop it now.

I've just returned from a John Darnielle performance in support of his latest record, We Shall All Be Healed, an autobiographical record (reportedly his first) about his troubled, tweaker-riddened times here in Portland, and am once again enraptured by the cult of the Mountain Goats. A packed house, frantically calling out a laundry list of cities to "Go To" each more obscure than the last, Darnielle ever gracious in the overwhelming outpour. Tonight we live and die by his spiteful tongue. Tonight we live and die.

Since 1991, John Darnielle has released six cassettes, 17 E.P.s and full-lengths (including the never released Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg), 10 seven-inches, and literally dozens of compilation appearances--amounting to some 400 plus known songs attributed to the Mountain Goats moniker. Or, to be more accurate, the same one song about 400 different times.

Perhaps the most polarizing voice in the independent music community, the Mountain Goats have spent the bulk of their career (with exception of their last two records for 4AD) being committed to low-quality cassette tape through the faulty condenser mic of a one track boombox; its subsequent product of predictably terrible fidelity. and that's only the first hurdle. Darnielle's voice is a nasal, treble-heavy whine, a relentless assault of amelodic verbiage over a franticly strummed three chord refrain, needless to say, it's sort of unapproachable. But with a little patience, Darnielle's narratives become oppressively rewarding.

There is no other songwriter in the world today who so gorgeously encapsulates the heartening bile of love's resentment. The Mountain Goats traverse the territory with such blissfully literate affection that it's difficult to see why anyone would want to escape its dark cloud. The largely fictional narratives fall into a number of prolific volumes, the most notable of which being the escapist "Going to" stories (comprised of some 43 songs to date, including "Going to Bristol," "...Georgia," "...Malibu," etc.), and the songs of the tragic "Alpha" couple, whose story comprises the whole of the recent Tallahassee record. Literate and passionate, Darnielle is one of those songwriters who may have better served the world as a novelist, but who exploits the song form in a way that shames the majority of his contemporaries.

let's wrap this up.

Personal passion aside, the Mountain Goats are, if for sheer volume alone, the Greatest Band of All Time.