The title track “The Coroner’s Gambit” is right at home on an album about death and memory.

Track: “The Coroner’s Gambit”
Album: The Coroner’s Gambit (2000)

I suggest that you look up the liner notes for The Coroner’s Gambit. The liner notes are always worth reading for a Mountain Goats album, but in this case specifically they include a direct address to Rozz Williams, who has passed on and is honored by several Mountain Goats songs. I think a few years ago I would have spent this space discussing Williams and the details of that further, but now I think it’s best to leave it at the liner notes themselves. John Darnielle says that if Williams is a ghost now, they should find him in Iowa and help themselves to everything in the fridge and the booze on top.

The album is about death and the title track is no exception. The placement of the title track directly after “Island Garden Song,” a thoughtful, solitary experience, and directly before “Baboon,” an angry, insistent one, is a mystery to me. I suppose you can’t go straight from this to “Shadow Song,” though I am going to do exactly that in this series. “The Coroner’s Gambit” is about Death, the figure, as well as death, the experience, and the personification has always made this a less emotionally challenging song in my eyes. It’s not lesser, by any means, but it doesn’t aim for the gut the way so many songs about death do. You are left with that repetition, though, and you are left wondering how attractive the offer would have to be for you to be unable to turn down someone you know to be the reaper.