Independent Rock Music: May 2004 Archives

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.

There is favorite music, and then there is secret music. The kind of music that no one you know knows (or cares to know) about. and that you keep to yourself. The kind of music that you find in a used record store or pawn shop, priced to move, that you've never even heard of. But for some reason, you buy it. and because it is secret, it's all the more precious.

Though sort of false, this is the sort of relationship I've always had with Octant, one of the only glimmers of hope in Seattle's very dim, very late '90s. False because, as mastermind Matthew Steinke (who, incidentally, my ex-girlfriend affectionately referred to as "Dead Baby Head," on account of his strangely infant-like facial features and generally lifeless pallor, a likeness not fully represented in the photo to the left) is something of a Northwest staple, the frontman for two notable should-have-beens Satisfact and Mocket, the band is of some abstract notoriety. But in the three-plus years since the band essentially pulled the plug, a pun that will soon make HILARIOUS sense, Octant seems to have sort of disappeared from the public psyche.

Octant began as side project to Steinke's full-time Mocket, as an outlet for his motorized experimentations. A collaboration with girlfriend Tassy Zimmerman (who, if I'm not mistaken, is one of the few notable people to come out of my hometown), Octant was something of an elaborate gimmick; a master of simple mechanics, Steinke applied his knowledge to a mountain of homemade instruments, the centerpiece of which being the ad3, a clunky drum kit that through a series of motors and flashing lights and other junk essentially played itself. the list of instruments also included (here comes that pun pay-off) circuit bent toys and keyboards, the electrified stringboard (a three string atonal instrument with a built-in mini keyboard and a row of "ambient" metal bars with drone and sweep effects), light modulated samplers, and the random tone generator (an old plastic bowling ball with ten miscellaneous light-modulated sound buttons, affected by a light bulb affixed on top of the ball). But for all of the elaborate contraptions, Octant's music was essentially pop-based: a sterile, scientific synth-pop that saw them through two very compelling records (1999's Shock-No-Par and 2000's Car Alarms and Crickets) before they split for Chicago in search of a more "like-minded" scene. That was the last that the world heard of Octant before they fell into the void, Steinke is currently earning his masters from the Art Institute of Chicago where he is focusing his mechanical inclinations on archaic art installations, with apparently no future plans for the band.

Regardless, limited output and public indifference cannot reduce Octant's status as The Greatest Band of All Time.