In “Malevolent Cityscape X” a narrator throws a barb at another character in a fiery, red moment.

Track: “Malevolent Cityscape X”
Album: Infidelity (as The Extra Glenns) (1993)

There are many small “collections” within songs by the Mountain Goats. There are dozens of songs that start with “Going to” and offer us a mental picture to accompany a story. There are four “Orange Ball” songs which are loosely connected. There are more “Alpha” songs about the Alpha Couple than can be counted. There exist only three songs in this particular collection: “Malevolent Seascape Y,” “Malevolent Cityscape X,” and “Ambivalent Landscape Z.”

All three are Extra Glenns songs, so they don’t get the kind of rotation that traditional Mountain Goats songs get at live shows. You’d need to dig very far back to find a recorded live performance of “Malevolent Cityscape X.” You’d find yourself at The Empty Bottle in Chicago, where you’d hear “Seascape” transition into “Cityscape.” The former is a quiet, sad song about the meaning of relationships. It wasn’t released for seven more years, on Martial Arts Weekend. The latter closed Infidelity, the three song EP that kicked off the Extra Glenns.

The connective tissue through these three songs is one character addressing another about the end. This isn’t an uncommon subject for John Darnielle, but “Cityscape” gets weirder than he usually does. Another character sings a song and changes the color of the sky, which causes our narrator to yell “you strike me as mean-spirited!”

So many other Goats narrators would love to find such a succinct message for the object of their ire. They’d also probably agree with the end of the second verse: “I love you beneath the red sky // but for the life of me I couldn’t say why.”