beat the champ

161. Werewolf Gimmick

Alex Russell Beat the Champ , , , , , , , , ,

A wrestler gives in to their baser instincts and goes primal in “Werewolf Gimmick.”

Track: “Werewolf Gimmick”
Album: Beat the Champ (2015)

The drums sell “Werewolf Gimmick.” Jon Wurster joined the Mountain Goats in 2007 and they haven’t been the same since. There are probably purists who think the Mountain Goats are only “real” with just John Darnielle and a bassist, but I can’t imagine that person could listen to “Werewolf Gimmick” and defend that position. There are plenty of songs that only work because they have a full band with horns and drums and everything, but “Werewolf Gimmick” is a 150-second explosion where the drums never let up for a second. It’ll wear you out just to listen to it once, in a good way.

Beat the Champ uses wrestling and wrestlers to talk about a variety of things, but “Werewolf Gimmick” is actually in the ring. It’s about a wrestler who portrays a werewolf and a heel determined to sell his act through intensity. Wrestling comes in many varieties. Sometimes it’s about the camp factor, but wrestlers like this werewolf think it’s about sincerity. Are these guys actually fighting for real, he wants us to wonder, and just maybe, only one of them knows that?

John Darnielle is at peak snarl here. He embodies his werewolf character when he describes the other wrestler as “some sniveling local baby face with an angle he can’t sell.” You can hear the twist in his mouth over “dial” in “get told to maybe dial it back, backstage later on” and if you like this brand of Goats song, this may be one of your favorites. John Darnielle sometimes says that the quiet ones are best, but if you like the rockers and screamers, you can’t do much better than “Werewolf Gimmick.”

131. Foreign Object

Alex Russell Beat the Champ , , , , , , , , ,

“Foreign Object” is a “funny” song that shows how John Darnielle has grown up from the time when he wrote “funny songs.”

Track: “Foreign Object”
Album: Beat the Champ (2015)

“Foreign Object” is not, at first, a challenging song. It’s literally about a guy with a foreign object. John Darnielle makes light of it at live shows by talking about how obvious it is and how the song is exactly what you think. All of Beat the Champ talks about wrestling, but “Foreign Object” takes the subject matter and lives in it completely.

Our narrator is angry and trying to stir up some anger in his opponent. Bravado is central to professional wrestling and our hero here wants his opponent to know they’re going to come at them with something fierce, outside the rules, and violent. They mention an “astrolabe” which wouldn’t work very well in a fight, but it conjures up an image. The aim here is to get under your opponent’s skin and to incite the crowd, and what better than ancient, bizarre tools and threats to bite someone’s flesh?

John Darnielle wrote “funny” songs for years and sometimes talks about how he doesn’t want to be the “funny song guy” anymore. “The Monkey Song” and “The Anglo-Saxons” don’t make sense at a show where you might look deep inside your soul and consider “Wild Sage” and “In Corolla,” so it makes sense why he wants to escape his former self. However, “Foreign Object” stands proud on Beat the Champ as testimony to the fact that the man can still write something silly. The bebop chorus of excited “bap bap bap!” noises after a verse about maiming a man only makes sense on a Mountain Goats record, but it’s a fine example of how the band can express multiple ideas but still have a core identity.

081. Choked Out

Alex Russell Beat the Champ , , , , , , ,

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8E_JInWvSHE

“Choked Out” describes a wrestler being choked, but it forces the listener to consider what we do when we’re desperate.

Track: “Choked Out”
Album: Beat the Champ (2015)

Much like how “the drugs album” isn’t only about drugs and “the Bible album” isn’t at all about the Bible, Beat the Champ is only tangentially about wrestling. The album delights in the language and characters of wrestling, but as John Darnielle says it’s about the difficulties of life. Even the EP released right after the album works this way: “Blood Capsules” is directly about a wrestler who can’t make ends meet despite being willing to do anything. That makes it a nice companion piece for “Choked Out,” a more in-the-moment examination of the same idea.

At a show in New York, Darnielle talked about how the song destroys his voice. It’s not really the kind of song the band writes as much these days. It’s an explosion, and after two minutes you’re left to consider what the flurry of words represents. As they are choked, Darnielle’s narrator describes the process and why they’re okay with it. A horrified nurse realizes they’re going beyond the bounds of what wrestlers should do, and the reality is that if you don’t fight within the “rules” when you wrestle you can do serious damage to yourself. In that sense, “fake” or “real” doesn’t really matter. The result may be scripted, but you have to put on a show without hurting yourself to get to the result.

They know the crowd wants to see something that looks real and they’re willing to oblige them at the cost of his consciousness. “Everybody has their limits // nobody’s found mine,” they tell us, establishing a willingness to do whatever it takes to put on a show. The crowd screams “like hounds in the heat of the chase” and the wrestler continues to describe representations of death. The ultimate sadness of the song: it’s all for $200.