“World Cylinder” closes the delightfully strange On Juhu Beach with a message about ignoring your problems.

Track: “World Cylinder”
Album: On Juhu Beach  (2001)

Juhu is a neighborhood of Mumbai on the western coast of India. The beach is well-known and that’s definitely the Juhu referenced in On Juhu Beach, but the liner notes for the album are in Japanese. John Darnielle lived in Iowa in 2001 and released an album with Japanese liner notes and a title named after a beach in India. The packaging is hand sewn and the album itself is rare, which means you’ll pay several hundred dollars if you want a real one.

All of this is to say that the five songs that make up On Juhu Beach are strange. It’s the perfect combination of things that contributes to the mythos of the Mountain Goats. The Japanese liner notes include “explanations” of each song, and they’re fascinating translated. “World Cylinder” boils down to “dance music for uncool people,” which seems like a good summation of what Mountain Goats fans are looking for some nights.

The song is fun and bouncy. The repeated “do I have to hit you over the head with it” sounds exasperated, but you can almost hear a smile and a laugh in John Darnielle’s voice. This is just after the bleak The Coroner’s Gambit and just before the complex All Hail West Texas. John Darnielle describes On Juhu Beach as “really different and out there” and it’s easy to see why. It doesn’t serve as connective tissue between anything and it’s tough to assign an overall feeling to the five songs. The album title does create a setting: a person not interested in the specifics of the world, but someone who really just wants to hang out by the beach and ignore the things that can’t be changed. Just what they’re ignoring is a canvas you can fill in yourself.