http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l75pioRWRAo

In the history of “Gojam Province 1968” people solve one problem only to find they can only do so much.

Track: “Gojam Province 1968”
Album: Satanic Messiah (2008)

Satanic Messiah is a four-song EP that contains a song called “Wizard Buys a Hat.” When he introduces the song live, John Darnielle sometimes mentions that he felt uniquely compelled to come up with something worthy of that title. It’s a great joke, but it doesn’t really prepare you for the rest of the EP. The albums are mostly thematic, but I haven’t found that the EPs follow anything like that. One of my favorites, Babylon Springs, has one song about a wrestler getting his righteous revenge on a world that has no use for him (“Ox Baker Triumphant”) and another about the sweetness of the “good” parts of infidelity (“Alibi”). The result is a bunch of great songs, but a puzzler when looking for a thread.

When you have a song like “Gojam Province 1968” you need no theme. It doesn’t go with “Wizard Buys a Hat” but it doesn’t really need to go with anything. In 1968, and, yes, in Gojam, the populace rose up against excessive taxes they were unable to afford. The government heard their pleas and met the resistance with reform. It’s a small victory in history, but a very big one for people who were “bashing in the heads of tax collectors.”

John Darnielle sings it softly and lightly plays a beautiful piano tune. For the last few years the band has been adding more and more quiet piano, which can sometimes feel at odds with the original one-man-stomping-and-destroying-a-guitar John Darnielle that many fans love. The best of the piano songs wouldn’t work any other way, though, and “Gojam Province 1968” needs to be this delicate. The end of the song leaves you with a “where do we go from here” feeling, and that’s the real point of this pretty song about ugliness.