“Let Me Bathe in Demonic Light” ends Dark in Here on a slightly more positive note than you might guess.

Track: “Let Me Bathe in Demonic Light”
Album: Dark in Here (2021)

There are more than a dozen Mountain Goats songs about literal groups of people from one’s past. Lots of them are about that in the abstract, too, but so many are about remembering where you were with some folks in a different physical setting and what you were like when you were there. “Let Me Bathe in Demonic Light” follows the progression of then to now and even beyond that into the end. We move, literally, but we don’t move on. It recalls “Genesis 3:23” to me, despite John Darnielle mentioning in interviews to think about “Palmcorder Yajna,” because of that reference to two physical spaces but moving between them. That song is more melancholy, but here it’s not about the past and the present. It’s less one becoming the other and more both existing as a bridge.

It’s also a natural closer. After all the darkness of Dark in Here, we find ourselves literally leaving that space and being somewhere else, at the end of the road. It works with a crowd for obvious reasons: “who, who among you, who’s coming with me?” You are compelled to answer and you will find yourself doing just that.