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CELEBREVIEW: Matt Besser

Mountain Goats Review
Three rules: 1) Remember your damn Yankees number. 2. If ever Adair were to have a friend, it would be only chaos. 3. You cannot handle chaos; seriously. These rules are for your own protection, and are also fake. (Except for the Yankees number.)
Reviewer
Matt Besser
Categories
Music
Reviewed by Matt Besser
Mountain Goats - The Life of the World to Come
If you take them by their word the Mountain Goats are the most depressing band ever. Most of their songs are short tales of sad lives. So sad that I find them funny. Lead singer John Darnielle has kind of a funny voice too, but it’s also sweet and powered with sincerity. I just saw them in concert and each song was like watching a different play.

Their latest release is The Life of the World to Come. The title of every song is a Bible verse. On the one hand I find that very annoying and not because I’m a devout atheist. It’s just because it makes it hard to remember the title of the song (there are two songs from Genesis!), because hell if I’m going to start memorizing Bible verses now. On the other hand I love it because it’s such a funny artistic choice. I assume the songs are inspired by the verses but it’s not very clear from listening to the lyrics. My favorite is Genesis 3:23, which on any other album would have been called “I Used to Live Here”.

Early Mountain Goats recordings were made with string and tin cans so it’s nice to hear that they’ve grown so far as to record this release at the best recording studio around, Electric Audio. You can tell too and I would describe that to you if I could write eloquently about sound but I can’t so instead I offer you a Michael Vick joke: What’s the difference between Michael Vick and Hurricane Katrina? Hurricane Katrina drowned dogs accidentally. Okay, back to the review. While I don’t like it as much as my favorite Tallahassee, this release is definitely worth buying, and definitely better than any of that other shit you bought this year.

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1 comments:

Kaitis

November 28, 2009 10:04 AM

I see the proble, here miss. You said your favorite player was Derek Jeter but your Yankees number says it's Bernie Williams.