535. Tidal Wave

Alex Russell Getting Into Knives , , , , , , ,

“Tidal Wave” finds the large things made up of small increments and prepares you for the flood.

Track: “Tidal Wave”
Album: Getting Into Knives (2020)

I don’t know that this matters for a band like the Mountain Goats, but “Tidal Wave” is the point where people stop listening to Getting Into Knives on Spotify. John Darnielle has talked about album construction before and I’ve referenced it a lot in this series, but there’s an idea that people only listen to the first four songs on the record and you should frontload your material accordingly. The two “singles” are in the first four on this album and “Tidal Wave” marks a descent into more jammy, less approachable stuff. Even years in, there are songs with about 200,000 plays in the middle of Getting Into Knives, which may as well be a billion for the early Mountain Goats but is not true of the two albums that followed this one.

“Tidal Wave” clicked for me when I saw it live. I used to write a post a day here but I fell off because I really struggled to find things to say about Getting Into Knives. When I saw this song live, though, it floored me. It’s a song about how small moments become one big one, clearly, but I couldn’t, for whatever reason, tie that to my own moments. Matt Douglas is at his best on “Tidal Wave” and I encourage you to see him do his thing live. The bass groove is also a small, backing reminder that things continue and the bricks will pile up whether you’re ready for them or not. You should try to be ready.

534. Shower

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , ,

“Shower” is a fierce, angry song from the perspective of someone who probably caused their own problems.

Track: “Shower”
Album: Unreleased (written for The Coroner’s Gambit, but not included)

The final lines of “Shower” recall wedding vows, though it’s clear we’ve gone beyond the realm of “for worse.” There are a lot of Mountain Goats narrators who only tell us their side of the story, but this one really wants us to know they don’t feel to blame. “You swore that you would stick around // when days like this started coming down” tells us definitively that the other person left, but the insistence and the delivery suggest to us that they might have been right to do so.

Getting into a shower with all of your clothes still on is a grand gesture. Just as there are a lot of songs about heartbroken people across the Goats’ catalog, there are a lot that show us that these grand gestures come from people who cannot do the emotional heavy lifting to do the little things that actually matter. I am reminded of “Korean Bird Paintings,” another song where someone tries to fill life with happy things to pave over some darkness we don’t get to see. Here is the reverse, where someone tries to enact the chaos they feel inside, outside.

This one never made The Coroner’s Gambit, but you can see from the scans of the notebooks that if it had it was more or less the same then as it is now. “Shower” seems to have never made the albums because it didn’t turn out exactly right, but you can hear in the fury behind it that there’s something there if you need it, should you ever find that you need it.

533. Nikki Oh Nikki

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , , ,

The ultimate memento mori, “Nikki Oh Nikki” helps you find perspective in a terrible way.

Track: “Nikki Oh Nikki”
Album: Unreleased (though recorded and released by John Vanderslice on Life and Death of an American Fourtracker)

Pitchfork called John Darnielle’s lyrics on “Nikki Oh Nikki” “surprisingly unremarkable” and slammed that song and “Amitriptyline” from John Vanderslice’s album Life and Death of an American Fourtracker as the low points of the album. They’re my two favorite songs on the record. Pitchfork also says that Vanderslice’s version of “Nikki Oh Nikki” is too reminiscent of a Pink Floyd song so your mileage, as ever with Pitchfork, may vary. That seems a simplistic comparison, to me.

Darnielle wrote the lyrics for “Nikki Oh Nikki” though the final Vanderslice version is undeniably his own. Percussive comparisons to “Money” aside, it sounds like a Vanderslice song. His vocals on “like a tumor” and similar wails are what you come to Vanderslice for, with the sole performance linked above by Darnielle as the only point of comparison we have. As near as I can tell, that’s the only recording you can find. The production is different, but the final version is also pared way down lyrically. Vanderslice’s version in 2002 is just the thrust of the message. Darnielle’s in 1997 includes an additional verse about a paranoia that everyone is sharing your secrets. The differences aren’t crucial because the result is the same: worry or not, it’s no big deal. That might be comforting, in a certain light, but it may be less so as you realize and insistently confront the fact that you are going to die.

532. I’ve Got the Sex

Alex Russell Unreleased , , , , , ,

The not-all-that-lost “I’ve Got the Sex” is absolutely sexual, but it’s brutal at the same time.

Track: “I’ve Got the Sex”
Album: Unreleased (but written for Sweden and not released)

There’s a lot to talk about with “I’ve Got the Sex,” and I’m going to start with the obsessive part. You can still use the Wayback Machine to read an old forum post where someone found a set of nine songs labeled as outtakes. Eight of them don’t fit my ruleset for this series as John Darnielle expressly asked people not to post them or request them at shows, but “I’ve Got the Sex” has been played dozens of times and seems to be the outlier. It was supposed to be on Sweden but John Darnielle says he left the tape at home and thus it didn’t make it. The other collection suggests it also almost made Nothing for Juice, but who can say?

I love the version I’ve posted above, from one of the best live shows the band ever played. Darnielle says he doesn’t usual play four songs in the solo section but he’ll entertain a “phantom fourth” and is cut off before he can say what it shouldn’t be (“Going to Georgia” is a safe bet) and the lone cry is for “I’ve Got the Sex.” Every version is great, but the sweaty, horror-infused version here helps walk the line between the inherent sexual nature of the song and the circumstances that surround it. This is a song about sex, sure, but it’s about animal instincts more than romance. You can imagine smearing strawberries over someone being something done out of passion, but there’s something else beneath all this that neither of you want to contend with directly.

531. Mobile

Alex Russell Dark in Here , , , , , , ,

“Mobile” is the story of Jonah, but it’s also about a balcony that’s as much in Alabama as it is in your own memory.

Track: “Mobile”
Album: Dark in Here (2021)

I did not really love Getting into Knives. A few people have commented over the years here that I seem to love every song, so I think it’s of some importance to be honest that I don’t. I think a few of the songs are great, but a lot of it washes over me no matter how many times I listen to it. I’ve told the story before where I saw someone with a full sleeve tattoo of the band who told me they don’t listen to them anymore, and part of me wondered if my time had come. I will never forget the experience of hearing “Mobile” from the follow-up album while in that headspace. It shattered the idea in my mind.

“Mobile” is the story of Jonah, directly, mixed with a brief narrative of someone “on a balcony in Mobile, Alabama” who feels like the prophet must have felt. My favorite song on Getting into Knives is the title track, which feels very much in conversation with “Mobile.” In both, I imagine someone who is looking out over their life and trying to imagine what comes next. There are a dozen other songs I could pick here, but “Mobile” specifically, and maybe because I’m from a similar part of the world as Mobile, Alabama, shines a light on a moment that feels very familiar. In almost all cases, when I don’t love a Mountain Goats song, it’s because I struggle to connect with it. That doesn’t make it a bad song (and a live show will help you see that, for sure) but it makes it not for me, at least in that moment. I have not been to Mobile, but I have, at times, asked for the storm. Maybe you have, too.

530. The Destruction of the Kola Superdeep Borehole Tower

Alex Russell Dark in Here , , , , , , ,

The narrator in “The Destruction of the Kola Superdeep Borehole Tower” goes where quite literally no one can go.

Track: “The Destruction of the Kola Superdeep Borehole Tower”
Album: Dark in Here (2021)

Recently I have seen a lot of people doing “style parodies” of the Mountain Goats, which is not a new idea but is on my mind as I think about “The Destruction of the Kola Superdeep Borehole Tower.” I think it’s a song that would help you identify what makes John Darnielle’s writing sound like it does. This is a song about a real place (the Kola Superdeep Borehole is the deepest man-made hole in the world, in western Russia) but a thing that did not happen there. When Darnielle has talked about the concept he’s focused on the idea that the hole itself is fascinating because it’s an extreme, but it’s more his jam to imagine the hoax that sprung up around it where people spread rumors that the Russians recorded the howls of Hell when they dug too deep.

Someone literally goes to Hell in this song, but we still spend time imagining their preparation of lacing their boots and checking on their compatriots. I’ve made the case a billion times here that the Goats are all about specificity, but they are equally about the mundane. The single most extreme element of any of the hundreds of Mountain Goats songs is contained in “listen for the voices calling out from down below,” but it’s just as much about the fact that this person has one fading thought about how the people back home will remember them for their steadfast approach to life. The subject is grand, massive, beyond the scope of human conception, but this moment is when you sneak away from your buddies and decide you’re mentally prepared to descend, quite literally, into Hell. In that, you unlock why “learn to wait your turn” is necessary and not a throw-away line.

529. Arguing With the Ghost of Peter Laughner About His Coney Island Baby Review

Alex Russell Dark in Here , , , , , , ,

“Arguing With the Ghost of Peter Laughner About His Coney Island Baby Review” isn’t about that, obviously, but let’s also do that.

Track: “Arguing With the Ghost of Peter Laughner About His Coney Island Baby Review”
Album: Dark in Here (2021)

“Arguing With the Ghost of Peter Laughner About His Coney Island Baby Review” has nothing to do with Peter Laughner or Coney Island Baby. The liner notes for Dark in Here describe it as being for David Berman, who passed away in 2019 and was a massive figure in indie rock and the surrounding worlds. I’ll never forget finding Silver Jews and Pavement albums in the rack at my college radio station and having my mind blown. Berman’s death is a tragedy and the lyrical content here is a tribute to his life and the sadness of his passing.

The title is obviously something else, and the review in question is worth looking up if you don’t know it. I certainly did not, and it is truly out there. Someone claiming to be “approved by the estate of Peter Laughner” messaged John Darnielle a joke about the title here but you can also read the review itself and marvel at rock criticism in 1976. I think you can read multiple things into the title, but Peter Laughner died very young, David Berman was older but also died tragically, and Lou Reed at the time was seen as writing less-appreciated, more traditional stuff and creating a legacy not everyone was going to love after his origins as a genius and out-there. You can absolutely interpret this multiple ways, but Darnielle’s disagreement with the review is tangential to the message and that part is clear and beautiful.

528. Bones Don’t Rust

Alex Russell Bleed Out , , , , , , ,

The day-in, day-out life of crime isn’t as glamorous as the big job, as we see in “Bones Don’t Rust.”

Track: “Bones Don’t Rust”
Album: Bleed Out (2022)

The first two verses of “Bones Don’t Rust” are all you need to understand the themes of Bleed Out. We’re dealing with an old-school, past-their-prime-but-who-cares kind of hood. The go-to stand-in for a lot of people will be guys from the blood-and-guts 70s and 80s, but I’ve lately been watching a lot of older noir crime movies and you see these guys in there just as often. “Bones Don’t Rust” imagines the life of someone who probably isn’t even named in one of those movies. This isn’t the main guy who is going to take home the big pay, this is a cog in the machine. Crimes in these movies require ensemble casts and some of those folks are just taking what they can get and doing a job.

“But they can find a use for a scarecrow // depending on your stomach for crows” is possibly my favorite example across Bleed Out. There are a lot to choose from, but you really understand the situation when you consider those two lines. This is work. It’s tough, probably illegal work, but it’s work. You drive the guy to the place and some stuff happens inside and then you drive him somewhere else. You get the next job because people around know you weren’t late to the last one. The characters we spend all our time with have grander goals, but you’re just at work. We don’t find out why this is the job you do, but that’s for another day. Today, you’re just punchin’ in and there are some jobs nobody else is going to do.

527. Incandescent Ruins

Alex Russell Bleed Out , , , , , , ,

The world of “Incandescent Ruins” is one you will create yourself, but the fear and the drive are right in the text.

Track: “Incandescent Ruins”
Album: Bleed Out (2022)

John Darnielle described “Incandescent Ruins” as “cheating” on the theme for Bleed Out because it’s more of a science fiction world than an action one. The main character here is escaping somewhere that has androids rather than remembering their youth as a two-bit hood, but the emotions are the same. Darnielle says it highlights his strength as a songwriter because you get these bits and pieces but you don’t get a full explanation. There’s no “the year is 20XX and the robots have taken over” but you don’t need it, because you’ve got enough to fill it in.

This one reminds me of the world of Moon Colony Bloodbath, an underrated piece of the larger Mountain Goats world about something sinister that happens in a future world where people harvest bodies on the Moon for sinister purposes. We don’t get enough time in “Incandescent Ruins” to know what happened, but that just isn’t important here. It’s more fascinating to not know and have to imagine it.

People have listened to the “singles” from Bleed Out five-to-ten times as many times as they have this one on most streaming services and it has virtually no commentary from fans that I can find, but I think this is one of the best on the album and one of the best of the last five years. Darnielle’s signature snarl is part of it for me, but this is just such a masterful set of lyrics. You’ll “see” this story the first time you hear it, but ask yourself why you imagine moss on these tunnels? What are you bringing to it?

526. Wage Wars Get Rich Die Handsome

Alex Russell Bleed Out , , , , , , ,

The Mountain Goats demand your attention and reward it with “Wage Wars Get Rich Die Handsome.”

Track: “Wage Wars Get Rich Die Handsome”
Album: Bleed Out (2022)

The closest cousin to me for “Wage Wars Get Rich Die Handsome” is “Choked Out,” another song that demands you fight and asks you to push past the limits to get what’s yours. Both are what I think of as “explosion” songs, where they’re over so fast and push so hard that you can’t escape the emotional core of them and don’t have time to consider anything other than the feeling. Comment sections for this one are full of people saying they want to hear it live and to scream along with the chorus. The shared experience and the full band are both big parts of what make this work.

I think songs like this are what make the Mountain Goats a tough band to describe. Yesterday in the grocery store someone stopped me based on my shirt and asked me if the Mountain Goats are a band. I stumbled over the question of what kind of music they make even though I have written 150,000+ words about just that. Because what do “Wild Sage” and “Wage Wars Get Rich Die Handsome” share, really? It’s that drive and that sense that you aren’t always in charge of the outcome of your life, but you can stack the deck if you push down the pedal at the right moment. Whether that’s in a quiet moment that demands you pay attention or a loud one that forces you to be unable to not notice, the Mountain Goats have a consistent message for you.