Full Force Galesburg

106. Original Air-Blue Gown

Alex Russell Full Force Galesburg , , , , , , ,

 

John Darnielle writes his own version of a Thomas Hardy poem in the ode “Original Air-Blue Gown.”

Track: “Original Air-Blue Gown”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Voice” includes the lines “Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then // Even to the original air-blue gown!” The rest of the poem talks about Hardy waiting for a woman’s return, though he slowly begins to realize that she cannot return. He thinks he hears her voice but also worries that she is a ghost. We get the sensation that his fears are founded.

The narrator in “Original Air-Blue Gown” waits for a similar return with similar fears. They describe colorful surroundings: green horseflies, plums, and red air. All of that color leads to “dark blue shapes” that they can just make out through their eyelids and the statement “I am not afraid of death.”

When a character says that we generally think they’re talking about their own mortality, but we need to look deeper here. Hardy was describing his wife in “The Voice” and Darnielle’s narrator is definitely describing someone else’s passing. They obsess over a black-and-white boxing match and the youth and power of Cassius Clay, which shows that they’re tied up in the past. The repetition of “my God, my God, my God // he was something” helps lock the image in the listener’s mind. You can’t breeze past it any more than the narrator can.

At the end of “The Voice” Hardy’s character attempts to come to terms with reality. Darnielle’s believes that the target of his affection has returned. The backing strings intensify and lend bonus eeriness to the scene. As a callback to the earlier repetition, the narrator looks out into the clearing where either a ghost or a loved one is and says “it’s you, it’s you, it’s you.”

105. Chinese House Flowers

Alex Russell Full Force Galesburg , , , , , , ,

 

The fierce “Chinese House Flowers” is suspiciously absent from live shows, but the one instance is magical. 

Track: “Chinese House Flowers”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

On September 11, 1996, John Darnielle played “Chinese House Flowers” at a concert venue called The Argo in Denton, Texas. It’s probably not the only time, but it’s the only time the good people at the Mountain Goats wiki list.

In various cars, apartments, backyards, and stranger venues I’ve played just about every song in the catalog for different people over the last decade. Just about everything — even the strangest of the strange — works for someone. “Chinese House Flowers” seems to work differently on me. People like it, but it doesn’t seem to get the same love as other fierce songs about love.

Chinese houses are purple and native to California. You can imagine mid-90s John Darnielle thinking of those flowers and home as he wrote Full Force Galesburg in Iowa. The album version features some trademark frantic strumming, but the selling point is the wavering, almost-terrified vocal track. His voice cracks over and over again and it drives home that this narrator is terrified. “I used to love you so much that I was sure it would kill me” could be a corny line in less deft hands, but it fits perfectly after “And just then the gleam in your eye // made my blood freeze” and other such expressions of fear.

Darnielle’s thoughts on the song aren’t obvious, though we can infer some things from the possible 20-year absence at live shows. If you’re like me and it works for you, I urge you to go check out that Denton recording. That venue’s long gone and Denton became immortalized far more famously by the Goats a few years later, but you should still go hear John Darnielle lose his mind over the chorus of “I want you more than I want anything // I want you the way you were.”

088. Masher

Alex Russell Full Force Galesburg , , , , , , ,

 

The narrator in “Masher” forgets words (and a lot more) as they confront a mysterious person in a tree.

Track: “Masher”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

Full Force Galesburg really is a confounding album. “Twin Human Highway Flares” is a love song and John Darnielle is on the record numerous times about the couple: himself and his now-wife. You hear that song and think you understand where he was at in 1997, but then you wonder where “Ontario” and “Snow Owl” fit with that. Then you come across a beautiful song like “Masher” and listen to it hundreds of times and still can’t break apart the chorus from the verses.

The chorus of “I am losing control of the language again” is evocative. You remember a time when you were so in love or so flustered or so angry or so confused that you forgot something as ingrained as language. That alone wouldn’t sustain a song, though the droning repetition of the line does sell the problem effectively.

It’s the verses. Our narrator is talking to a loved one, like most of the narrators on Full Force Galesburg. They list certainties (brine boiling, air containing the smell) before revealing that they’ve been incarcerated in some way, which they seem to view as a third unavoidable reality. It might be a metaphor, but by the second verse they are losing their memory to a greater degree. They’re either unstable or being destabilized by the person they see in a tree. How you take that part depends on how you take the title, given a “masher” is primarily a tool for mashing potatoes, but can also be British slang for a creepy guy. The delivery is sweet, but the couple on Full Force Galesburg is generally not a happy one. With only one perspective, we’re left to wonder about the other view of their relationship.

071. Weekend in Western Illinois

Alex Russell Full Force Galesburg , , , , , , ,

 

The lovers in “Weekend in Western Illinois” admire happy dogs as they experience sweeping events all around them.

Track: “Weekend in Western Illinois”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

You may be the sort of person who likes the quiet of “Masher” or “Ontario” or you may be the sort of person who likes to speculate about the characters in “Minnesota” or “Evening in Stalingrad.” Full Force Galesburg is varied and excellent and it will support you, no matter what you’re looking for in a Mountain Goats record. Sometimes you’re just looking for a song for a windows-down drive. “Weekend in Western Illinois” is about as “rocking” as John Darnielle and company were capable of being in the days before the drums. If you can listen to it without tapping your foot or snapping along, I would question if your blood is indeed red.

Like the best version of “Going to Kansas,” the song’s instrumentation really evokes the apocalypse. The strumming is intense, but it’s the organ that really brings the house down. All of the lyrics also describe huge, sweeping events. Take your pick from “the sky’s opening up like an old wound,” “the ground underneath us shakes in the cracking thunder,” and “we are watching the sky unwinding.” The dogs out there in Galesburg even “howl as though the world were ending,” as if you couldn’t feel that in every tense second.

While the world’s figuratively (or literally, given the narrator’s insistence) ending around them, the characters go through their own turmoil. “We are burning up all of our choices” is a nice summation of the couple that’s falling apart across the album, and Darnielle mentions blood twice, which is high even for a Goats song. There’s much more to unpack, but you can find everything you need to know about these lovers in the way John belts out “some of our promises were binding up here where our dreams take form” over the final tense strums.

051. US Mill

Alex Russell Full Force Galesburg , , , , , , , , ,

“US Mill” features both the Mountain Goats’ obsession with location and an intriguing vagueness.

Track: “US Mill”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

Location is obviously important to the Mountain Goats, but Full Force Galesburg challenges what “location” really means. “Minnesota” may or may not happen in Minnesota. “Down Here” talks about Australia, but likely not for any particular reason. For both of those, it’s more about specificity as a concept than it is the actual, specific place. The standout “Weekend in Western Illinois” and the album-closing “It’s All Here in Brownsville” both talk about border towns, and John Darnielle has said that they’re linked for that reason. The concept of living somewhere between two things and not really feeling right in either of them is instantly relatable, be it two places or two feelings.

A song like “US Mill” takes that concept even further, since it’s nothing but locations. The first four lines, “Way up north // Down the road a little // Back in New England // Right here in the middle,” are just four descriptive phrases that help you imagine a location in general, but they don’t really tell you where you are. The rest could function as a starting point for a Mountain Goats phrasebook. “Listening for the old sound” and “bright as gold” show up often enough in other songs that they feel like familiar descriptions here. There’s no crime in reusing phrases, and in fact they make what sounds like a straightforward song feel like a bigger part of the catalog.

The strumming is impossible to resist, and you’ll find yourself snapping along with it after a few listens. It’s a fitting tune for a high point. They are hopeful and they are listening, but we know from the rest of Full Force Galesburg (if these are the same people as the couple in “Minnesota” or “Chinese House Flowers” especially) that they should enjoy it while it lasts.

039. Minnesota

Alex Russell Full Force Galesburg , , , , , , , , , ,

Two oddly romantic images in “Minnesota” briefly obscure a tale about how we can forget how to love each other.

Track: “Minnesota”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

“A little angrier and a little less easy to sympathize with.” – John Darnielle, comparing the couple in Full Force Galesburg to people on other Mountain Goats albums.

For an album that ends with a repetition of “it’s all coming apart again,” there’s a lot of sweet-sounding stuff on Full Force Galesburg. It’s a tough album to break down in a lot of respects. John Darnielle mostly describes it as an album about two desperate people who aren’t in a healthy relationship with each other anymore, but that can very loosely be layered onto many, many Goats albums. These two specifically are going through something else.

“Minnesota” stretches the definition of “love song.” One character surrounds their house with Dutch seeds while the other sings an old song. While those are nice images, they are surrounded by suggestions of something very grisly. Both verses talk about an unrelenting heat, and in the heat our guide through this romance is drinking and staring at his wife. He’s only drinking and staring at her.

If you are given to hope, it may be difficult to pull out the darkness in a song that’s this sweet on the surface. Full Force Galesburg has much angrier guitar on it elsewhere and the lyrics of “Chinese House Flowers” speak much more directly to the end of love (“I want you the way you were”), but “Minnesota” is just as grim about the chances of these two working out. These two are sharing some strangely intimate moments, but they aren’t really communicating. This is not The Alpha Couple, but it’s certainly people who could appreciate their method of “dealing” with problems.