The Alpha Couple considers the sweetness of evil things as they contemplate their relationship in “Alpha Negative.”

Track: “Alpha Negative”
Album: The Hound Chronicles (1992)

“Ah, c’mon, nobody knows that one.” – John Darnielle at a live show, about “Alpha Negative”

After a few jokes about playing a song from 1992, John Darnielle adds that it’s not like the music he plays now, and that it was written by someone with “more death in his heart” than the current frontman of The Mountain Goats. It calls to mind the intro for “Going to Georgia” where he said that it was a song written by a very different person who had the same Social Security number.

In the original recording, there’s little better than the way Darnielle nervously delivers “cool and smooth and sweet” over and over again. Every mention of “smooth” in the song has an eeriness to it, and it forces you to consider that this person was at least partially complicit in their fate. The narrator drank poison, but they liked it, to some degree. They’re less angry than they are fascinated with their own end. That’s a recurring trait in early Goats narrators, but this one is even more dramatic than the standard fare.

The Bright Mountain Choir adds some sweetness to the whole thing, and they really bring it all together. There are angrier narrators (“Baboon” and “Poltergeist” come to mind) and there are people closer to literal death (“Sax Rohmer #1”) but there is still enough in “Alpha Negative” to think about. “I loved you, and you made me drink poison” says one Alpha to the other, but we know that’s not really the whole story. At this moment, one of them feels like they have a case against the other. They’re still blaming each other, and they’ll need to get to Florida to gain some perspective.