#312

Speaking of music, a thing that happened even since last time I wrote at length about The Mountain Goats--not so long ago--is that they put out yet another new album, Bleed Out. It's a very good album. Like, way better than I expected it to be given the pace of release lately. Not all the time, but too often, when artists put out work at an increased rate, it goes hand in hand with a certain compromise in quality. This record is as crazy good as Dark in Here, which really says a great deal. The last three albums could any one of them and as a group of three be the very best they've ever made, though I might say that about many groups of three of their albums. Anyhow, my favorite tracks off Bleed Out, for the nonce: "Bones Don't Rust", "Guys on Every Corner", "Incandescent Ruins", "Bleed Out", and a couple more though I'm not ready to say which. Have to listen to it some more, though I have listened to it quite a bit.

In point of fact, I'm doing a project I haven't done in several years now, which is smacking all the extant Mountain Goats music I can get onto a single playlist and listening to the whole thing on shuffle. It's going fair smoothly; I've had problems in the past with the device losing its place or playing something else without my telling it so. This current phone and current build of iTunes/"Music"/whatever is treating me ok, though, and am a few hours into a 28-hours-plus endeavor.

Since I mostly listen to music in the car, trips to and from work or over to see my parents are the main avenue. Need to listen to the phone try its best all alone or use a bluetooth speaker, since the car won't play CD's or tapes or fucking anything except the radio, and not very well. The van does whatever you could want, but I leave driving that to Ezra. In the kitchen, while doing dishes or cooking, I listen to a CD on our shiny blue boombox. It's got a Spinosaurus sticker and a Psittacosaurus sticker on it. 

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Believe it or not, I still haven't got around to completing Paradise Lost. Part of the way through Steppenwolf and Los Años Extraordinarios, but I put all of that on hold to reread all of George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire stuff--Fire and Blood, The World of Ice and Fire, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, and the main ASoIaF series. 

That other stuff is still on hold at the moment because I'm rereading all my J.R.R. Tolkien; wrapped up The Silmarillion, Beren and Lúthien, and The Children of Húrin, finishing up Unfinished Tales, then when that's done, on to The Fall of Gondolin, the appendices to The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings itself for last.

Frankly, I'll try to finish the other stuff, but probably what will happen is once I'm finished with the Tolkien I will read my new Haruki Murakami books, and then maybe probably reread all the other ones I have and maybe buy some more I don't have and read those. It's just what I'm feeling. We'll see. After that I'm thinking about Ursula K. Le Guin. Or a bunch of science/history/philosophy books. We'll see. That's far ahead. You never know. We will just have to see.

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Ok cool whatever BYE

--JL

#288

Album Week, 2022, Day Six: Mountain Goats Day.

The Reckoning.

Literally, as no less than four (or, alternately reckoned, seven) new (or, to reckon alternatively, three) instances of Mountain Goats music have dropped since Album Week 2019: Three full-length albums of new music and four discs worth of extemporaneous recordings. This is the sort of embarrassment of riches which stands as evidence for the infinite love of the Almighty. 

So! No need for further chatter. Let us reconnoiter these brave new sonic landscapes.

Songs for Pierre Chauvin

This album is an answered prayer in many ways. I'm not one of those purists that only wants and only recognizes JD alone with a boombox as the best and truest form of MG music, but that doesn't mean it doesn't hold a particularly exalted place on the altar of my heart. In addition, the subject matter itself is Classic. And when John writes about the Classics, I am happy. So this love letter specifically to me at the start of a pandemic felt like a kiss on the forehead, a sacramental blessing, a sign that even if nothing was ever going to be okay again and I was shortly to die of lung failure or revolutionary bullet or fiery nuclear holocaust, at least I'd blasted "Until Olympius Returns" as loud as I could from the speakers of a car, singing along in wild abandon. At least I'd heard new music in these old ways once more in my lucky, lucky lifetime. And dear Lord, if every single song isn't a triumph and a wonder and a beautiful missive. Also this album makes me think of a dear friend whom I haven't seen in too long, and that salt-tear-flavored feeling is always wonderful in music.

We're gonna do it like this: scores out of twenty per track, letter score for the album afterwards. I'd like to write at length about each one, each album, but come on. We all have places to be. A short commentary along the lines of one long sentence or three short ones may sometimes be appropriate; I shall use my discretion.

1. "Aulon Raid": 19/20. 

Beautiful song. Warm welcome. Swelling feeling in the breast. 

2. "Until Olympius Returns": 20/20

Hymn to clench your jaw to. Anthem to survive by.

3. "Last Gasp at Calama": 17/20

4. "For the Snakes" 17/20

5. "The Wooded Hills Along the Black Sea" 20/20

God Damn this song hurts so good. I mean fuck. Wow. 

6. "January 31, 438" 18/20

7. "Hopeful Assassins of Zeno" 19/20

8. "Their Gods Do Not Have Surgeons" 17/20

9. "Going to Lebanon 2" 20/20

"Going to Lebanon" is a personal favorite, so there is bias, but worth mention anyway: lyrically subtle yet significantly intertwined with the first, and a chorus of astonishing beauty and musicality.

10. "Exegetic Chains" 19/20

Songs for Pierre Chauvin: A+

Getting Into Knives

Getting into knives, are we? You know, I'm somewhat into knives as well. Yes indeed. It's a smooth one, even smoother than In League With Dragons. For some, the increasing smoothness and evenness of the albums are a sonic problem, but I think the grain is present always--it just don't hit the same. I don't know what the fuck people are talking about when they talk about accessibility as it relates to music, but people have complained that the albums have become less interesting and lower quality as they become more accessible. To me in personal conversations, anyway; haven't read the internet about it. Probably their recently attained powers of famousness play a role, which I can understand perfectly. Things being too famous is a huge turnoff in general. In this case, well, iconoclast I may be, but sometimes, fame just don't bug me. They can get as famous as they want, fuck it, I'm still here for it. The distaste that accompanies excessive fame can be ameliorated by never reading the comments on anything, getting off social media entirely, and only talking to the same twenty people ever--sparingly. I am capable of stomaching serious discussion on the music of The Mountain Goats with a grand crowning total of two human beings on this planet and don't want or look for more. People just say the same boring shit they read online, it's incredible; a whole society of trained parrots. At any rate while there is a certain quietus over the album and a high degree of polish and control, here lie some of the most interesting and addictive songs they've made. If there is a problem, I have to look for one, and find it only in that maybe some of the songs are a skosh long. So big whoop! I'm into these knives. These knives!

1. "Corsican Mastiff Stride": 20/20

The shortest song on the album and one of the three most perfect. Yeah! 

2. "Get Famous": 16/20

3. "Picture of My Dress": 17/20

4. "As Many Candles As Possible": 17/20

5. "Tidal Wave": 17/20

6. "Pez Dorado": 19/20

7. "The Last Place I Saw You Alive": 19/20

8. "Bell Swamp Connection": 16/20

9. "The Great Gold Sheep": 20/20

Maybe the best song on the album; hearkens to the compositional families of some of the best songs on All Eternals Deck and Moon Colony Bloodbath, which are some of the best ever. In the history of all songs.

10. "Rat Queen": 20/20

Just awesome. Such guitars!

11. "Wolf Count": 19/20

12. "Harbor Me": 17/20

13. "Getting Into Knives": 16/20

 Getting Into Knives: A-

Dark In Here

It's all still rather new, so I don't have a ton to verbalize, but this record has some of the greatest instrumentals of any Mountain Goats release ever. It's an amazing album. Fucking incredible. So many perfect songs. So much unprecedented ground explored with such unerring confidence. So much raw power under such tight control.

1. "Parisian Enclave": 20/20

2. "The Destruction of the Kola Superdeep Borehole Tower": 20/20

3. "Mobile": 17/20

4. "Dark In Here": 20/20

5. "Lizard Suit": 20/20

6. "When a Powerful Animal Comes": 20/20

7. "To the Headless Horseman": 17/20

8. "The New Hydra Collection": 18/20

9. "The Slow Parts on Death Metal Albums": 20/20

10. "Before I Got There": 20/20

11. "Arguing with the Ghost of Peter Laughner About His Coney Island Baby Review": 18/20

12. "Let Me Bathe in Demonic Light": 19/20

Dark In Here: A+

The Jordan Lake Sessions 1, 2, 3, and 4

Fancy live recordings! Well, it's easier to get a real clean balanced sound when there's no giant room full of noisy people to account for. What can one really say about them except that they are, by and large pretty juicy and good? There are standouts and semi-disappointments, rediscoveries and rarities, small pleasures and meaningless frustrations. It's good stuff, worth making, worth having. I give it all an A. 

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Some may ask themselves: is there any Mountain Goats effort you would not give an A to, Mr. Lidd, and therefore, is not your rambling basically useless? The answer is no, and who cares.

Album Week 2022 Mountain Goats concludes! Woop woop! I'll probably do a non-Album Week post in between this and the finale, just so's you'd know, if you were wondering.

--JL

#200

Wow, the two hundredth post. The second hundred is complete, or will  be, when I smash that "post" button. When it gets smashed. When I pound that post button, grinding it hard into the surface of the world wide web, the two hundredth factually pointless post will burrow into internet's flesh and there it will fester for eternity, or however much less than that depending on how things go.

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200.

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There are a lot of bands and musicians that are very special to me in the kind of way that sort of defines one as a person. The hard core, you know.

If a person's hard core is made up of, say, early-nineties gangster rap, a few particular strains of what the record companies call rhythm and blues from the early and middle aughts, and the Frank Ocean wave, it will have some bearing on how the person carries and dresses themselves, and how they parse their cultural world and move through society. You might have formed a picture of this person in your mind; you may be able to form various pictures of various persons that might fit this bill. How this is done is dependent on the lenses you view this person through, your own hard core; perhaps this person stands very close to you, or perhaps your fascination with honky-tonk, bluegrass, and country music recorded before the year nineteen-sixty places a few lenses of refraction in between the place where you stand and they do. Perhaps you mainly listen to Sibelius and Debussy, or are completely consumed by surf-infused third-wave riot grrl shriekpunk. Maybe you used to be very into hardcore but now it's groovy 80's synthpop and the return of the electronic organ aesthetic.

'Sall good, folks. Music is just math you can hear. Patterns and iterations. All of it unique and exactly the same. The rest is coats of paint and personality. Intent and reception.

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Selectively--keeping it after 1900, avoiding incidental music, and omitting artists for whom only spare tracks reach this level (one fine day perhaps I shall generate a tracklist), and relegating The Red Hot Chili Peppers to "honorable mention" status--my own hard core is comprised of the following artists:

Gogol Bordello, Caspian, Rubén Blades, Robert Johnson, Quinteto Contrapunto, Two Gallants, Simón Díaz, Muddy Waters, John Frusciante, Serenata Guayanesa, Aesop Rock, Modest Mouse, Louis Armstrong, Santana, Ensemble Gurrufío, and Nina Simone.

There was no particular order, there. There is no truly ranking the hard core, you need it all to be who you are, totally separate from art that you can talk rationally or dispassionately about. There is art you can fully compass and bind within your ideas, and there is art for which though your ideas are bigger and more important and more fully  developed than perhaps any other ideas you have, they fall short, and don't matter, in the face of the indescribable feeling, the duende, the grace.

Beyond the hard core, though, residing in an innerspace even more vast and intimate than the place where your favorite music lives, there's the stuff that transcends even the ranks of the first and best. To analogize, in bookworld, Lord of the Rings is, as I have stated in no uncertain terms, beyond human reproach and the greatest extant literary achievement. On this matter, I will brook no argument because there is not one to be had; people who care less than I do about Lord of the Rings can have those arguments. To me, those people, when they are talking about Lord of the Rings, might as well not exist. Easier to understand people who actively hate Lord of the Rings or cannot so much as begin it than people who read it, maybe even more than once, and don't "get" it.

Even though there's nothing to get because what is actually happening is that this work warps the space around it (my psyche) and fundamentally changed its reality. My subjective position is both integral to my being-in-the-world and at odds with how the world actually is, for in this world, no work of hand or human symbol reigns supreme, and in mine, a miracle took place. In the end, of course, it's just a story. But everybody has their Story.

Coming back to music, it's Queen, and The Mountain Goats.

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This year, The Mountain Goats dropped their seventeenth studio album.

Yes. Seventeen. Kind of an important number in this blog. 

After the way Goths was received and popularized, I felt pretty sick in myself about where things were in general, and not long afterwards a lot of life happened, so I was caught off guard by In League With Dragons because I had stopped reading about music, stopped looking at places that hype and criticize music. And I didn't listen to it for a few months after it dropped because I wasn't acquiring anything new either, hadn't heard the new Two Gallants or the new Gogol Bordello, nothing. I was icy with music, frozen in place.

Things are thawing now, though, and I've given it a few spins. Every Mountain Goats album is at one time or another my favorite, it never stops, always something is happening, and right now In League With Dragons is it, their best work and best writing so far, absolutely beautiful, a comfort and a clarion call and an incredible pleasure.

"Possum By Night". What a fucking track. How does something like this even happen.

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When you were born only a few years before somebody started putting their music out on cassette tapes, there is a disadvantage when it comes to being on board for the early days. I didn't hear The Mountain Goats till I was sixteen and they were starting to become quite popular--Heretic Pride, an album which was pretty big, dropped a little while after I started listening; my first new Mountain Goats. Heady, halcyon days.

The track that got me good, the hook, was "Up the Wolves". 

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Feels good to be listening to music again. I may write more about The Mountain Goats tomorrow, and I may not. 

I have also been listening to a lot of Jimmy Cliff, Toots and The Maytals, The Animals, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Also all the other music I have mentioned today.


--JL