Palmcorder Yajna

421. Slow West Vultures

Alex Russell Palmcorder Yajna, We Shall All Be Healed , , , , , , ,

We Shall All Be Healed opens with “Slow West Vultures” and gets right to the point.

Track: “Slow West Vultures”
Album: We Shall All Be Healed (2004)

There’s a lot happening in “Slow West Vultures.” Someone breaks a bottle in the background. There are at least two seemingly unrelated vocal samples, a device you hear on the early albums often but not so much anymore. The backing vocals are elevated, which isn’t totally unheard of but is rarely this notable. It signals that this album isn’t quite what you’ve heard before, which is fitting. This is post Tallahassee, so the band’s sound has already changed, but it’s pre The Sunset Tree, so the honesty is new.

John Darnielle has often been accused of being the narrator of his songs, which he says he understands but disavows when he can. In the early days of writing this series I was surprised to confront how often the gender identity of the narrator is even ambiguous, suggesting that it isn’t even a male speaker. The person in We Shall All Be Healed is not explicitly John Darnielle like it is in The Sunset Tree, but if not, it’s much closer than it usually is.

The lyrics are a relatively straightforward affair for We Shall All Be Healed. Everyone does drugs, everyone understands they’re going to do more drugs. There’s some nice wordplay here, but I’m always struck by “ready for the future” because it calls back to the album title and the joke within it. There’s likely not a future and likely nobody here is going to be healed.

307. Letter from Belgium

Alex Russell Palmcorder Yajna, We Shall All Be Healed , , , , , , ,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU5Xv1LK4X0

“Letter from Belgium” is a song for lockdown that wasn’t intended to be that originally, but now can be your COVID-19 jam.

Track: “Letter from Belgium”
Album: We Shall All Be Healed (2004) and Letter from Belgium (2004)

At the start of quarantine in 2020, John Darnielle tweeted that “Letter from Belgium” is the “quarantine deep cut” among Mountain Goats songs. I’d heard the song hundreds of times before that moment and never connected it to the experience of the moment. It’s impossible not to hear it, though, when you’re listening for it: “We’ve been past the point of help since early April.” Depending on where you live, COVID-19 became a reality in your world around then. A weird line, especially in a song about “waiting for the fever to break.”

“Letter from Belgium” is about a different cause for alarm, but the panic is similar. These characters are locked in rooms with other substances they need, to the point where they reject the world. They obsess over stage makeup and odd, disconnected artwork. They express fear of neighbors and outsiders. It’s very much in line with the We Shall All Be Healed character study.

It doesn’t matter if you read it through a modern lens or through the album’s. This is a song for when you can’t go outside, whether there’s an external reason for that or not. Sometimes you’re just in there because you have to be in there, John Darnielle tells us, and you’ll make do with what you have. The items are only connected if you get in the right headspace, which is hopefully not a place you find yourself for an extended period of time.

227. Butter Teeth

Alex Russell Palmcorder Yajna , , , , , ,

“Butter Teeth” spends some time with the folks in Portland as they steal things they don’t need.

Track: “Butter Teeth”
Album: Palmcorder Yajna (2003)

“Butter Teeth” is part of the larger universe of We Shall All Be Healed. It’s straightforward in subject matter, as John Darnielle’s narrator tells us they and their compatriots are going to steal random items and look for next steps in a world without next steps. The characters on the album and the two singles that accompany it, Palmcorder Yajna and Letter from Belgium, are not going to make it out of this okay. We might check in on this bunch during a momentary high or during times long after those highs, but we always know the trajectory they’re on no matter what point in the timeline that song happens.

“Butter Teeth” finds the group wandering around and stealing things. “Artlessly shoplifting random things” is a fun turn of phrase, and John Darnielle sells it with a beat before “random” that makes the line almost seem fun. It’s possible in these moments to forget the grander arc of these people’s experience. Much like “Counterfeit Florida Plates,” the mundane elements of someone’s experience can be viewed outside the whole and seem not so bad for a moment, until we’re forced to consider what counting cars or stealing cough syrup actually means for that person’s life.

John Darnielle’s comments about “Butter Teeth” focus on that stealing and on how people outside that group view it. When you see someone in a CVS put some sunscreen in their jacket or someone taking shower curtain rings, what goes through your head? You can try to fill in the details, but John Darnielle wants us to really wonder for more than that brief moment.

154. Snakeheads

Alex Russell Palmcorder Yajna , , , , , ,

John Darnielle asks us to consider what we’d risk and what we’ll do no matter what in “Snakeheads.”

Track: “Snakeheads”
Album: Palmcorder Yajna (2003)

We Shall All Be Healed is anxious. It’s an album all about drug use and drug users, and it’s not pretty. John Darnielle spent time among the real versions of these characters and he’s not interested in romanticizing any of them. Some of them are colorful and almost funny, but you can’t walk away from the album with anything less than a deep fear and concern for this world.

We’re off the beaten path of addiction fear with “Snakeheads.” It’s one of the three songs on the Palmcorder Yajna single and it’s an odd duck in the catalog. It’s definitely still a Mountain Goats song, with named but unexplained characters and a destination but no way of knowing what that destination actually will mean. It’s just musically dissimilar to everything else. It shuffles around with a slow tempo and light percussion. It makes you feel the trudging pace of the characters as they head to unnamed islands through the northern part of the United States.

Snakeheads are smugglers who transport Chinese people wherever they want to go but cannot go legally. It’s a curious thing to talk about, since it seems to be something done willingly and for pay, but within a legal space where autonomy and results seem questionable. These characters are real Snakeheads, with cargo that’s hungry and stuck in the dark in Minnesota, but John Darnielle considers the addict’s life in comparison. They’re obviously different, but they’re all stuck outside the law and they are going to do what they’re going to do. A theme across We Shall All Be Healed is an unwillingness to change, consequences and reasoning be damned, and John Darnielle wants us to think about what we’d risk the back of that van for in our lives.

055. Palmcorder Yajna

Alex Russell Palmcorder Yajna, We Shall All Be Healed , , , , , , ,

“Palmcorder Yajna” may be the most plainly stated Mountain Goats song about the day-to-day of an addict.

Track: “Palmcorder Yajna”
Album: We Shall All Be Healed (2004)

The term “single” is a strange one. For “the song of the Summer” and whatnot it still makes sense, but for a band like the Mountain Goats it mostly strikes me as an interesting bit of trivia. The people that are going to get consumed by an album of songs about tweakers in the Pacific Northwest aren’t going to do it because they heard the single. Sometimes it’s fascinating to find out what the “single” is from an album. That said for some albums, the single from the anti-meth-but-mostly-just-reflective-about-meth We Shall All Be Healed is “Palmcorder Yajna” and it couldn’t really be anything else.

“Letter from Belgium” rocks enough (and was the second single as a result) and “Pigs That Ran Straightaway into the Water, Triumph Of” is fun enough that it was recently played on Late Night with Seth Meyers, but the perfectly sneered vocals and infectious drums of “Palmcorder Yajna” leave no room for dispute. You might call it “fun” the first few times you hear it. The scream of “if anybody comes to see me // tell ’em they just missed me by a minute // if anybody comes into our room while we’re asleep // I hope they incinerate everybody in it” is peak yelling John Darnielle, and it makes this the kind of song even a casual fan can appreciate.

Under the surface, it’s terrifying. The opening lines describe Holt Boulevard, where a younger John Darnielle was told to tell the cops he bought his heroin if he ever got caught, because there were too many dealers for the cops to ever figure out which he meant. The Travelodge of “Palmcorder Yajna” is really the setting for all the terror on the album, and it may be the closest to perspective that Darnielle ever lets his addicts get.