Two characters find a moment of peace before a stormy future in “Red Choral Diamond Spray.”

Track: “Red Choral Diamond Spray”
Album: Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg (1995)

If you can explain the title to “Red Choral Diamond Spray” you can solve a mystery I am not able to solve. Red coral, spelled differently, is a type of jewelry, often used with diamonds. That’s as far as I can get. Inscrutable title aside, this is a story John Darnielle tells elsewhere in Mountain Goats songs. People leave one place and arrive at another one. They fear the change, but they fear what it says about each of them and their relationship even more. “We will never see Ireland again,” they say, but places in Mountain Goats songs are about much more than geographic locations.

The vocals are almost a whisper and the guitar is so gentle here, especially following songs that are angrier, if not sadder. The use of physical locations to represent people you cannot become again is one thing, but the plucking here really tells you more than that. For me, the best moment of “Red Choral Diamond Spray” is the voice crack over “add the distances between them all.” This is one where I’d recommend the “not fixed” version over the pitch-corrected track, because there’s an almost sweetness to this version that I like. These two characters are not headed for better days and they are explicitly mourning the loss of who they once were. That’s not sweet, obviously, but they have each other as they look back. That’s something, which the tone here reminds us even if the lyrics insist it’s downhill from here.