“Beautiful Gas Mask” has some painful, difficult imagery, but it’s also something you can dance along with as you worry.

Track: “Beautiful Gas Mask”
Album: All Eternals Deck (2011) and All Survivors Pack (2011)

All Eternals Deck is a hard album for me to get my head around. It came out at the busiest time of my life, during a time of extreme transition where I felt overwhelmed all the time. When I think of it I remember how many times I listened to “Damn These Vampires” and how great the ending of the album is, leading several clearly thematically connected songs into each other to leave the listener with a sense that the whole thing was about one idea. It’s not correct to say I don’t love All Eternals Deck, but it does share, to my mind, something with Transcendental Youth in that I love both albums but I find some of the material difficult to connect with directly. This is entirely a personal opinion and not a statement on either album, but it’s something I’ve tried to analyze for myself as to why I left a few of these songs for the very end.

“Beautiful Gas Mask” is one such song. It’s about paranoia, which I find less relatable than many of the other problems Mountain Goats narrators experience. It’s a great song with a catchy chorus and I’ve always been fond of the drums, but the personal connection relies on your ability to feel this peril. Leave it to the Mountain Goats to have you tapping your toes as you hear about being caught in jaws and crushed like fleas.