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$9.99
Second in a series of three compilations of increasingly rare and difficult-to-track-down Mountain Goats songs that first saw the light of day on a blur of 7" EPs, cassettes, and compilation/fanzine appearances during the 1990s. This 27-track volume (known in our circles as "Da Bomb") includes a huge swath of hooky, funny and poignant 'Goats-isms, incorporating several individual releases that stand out like Paul Bunyan among the myriad generic indie-rock releases from the same era. These songs were almost all recorded direct-to-cassette in the classic MG style and even despite the impermanent, flighty nature of the delivery and even some of the subject matter, they are a testament to John Darnielle's uncanny knack for carving out completely memorable 2-minute songs from the barest of ingredients. There are appearances here from the Bright Mountain Choir as well as a liberal dose of bassist/vocalist Rachel Ware, too, before her departure from the band. From Songs for Petronius, the very first Mountain Goats 7" (Shrimper, 1992), there's the perennial favorite "The Bad Doctor" ("and the stars jockeying for position..."), the beautifully defiant "Alpha Double Negative: Going to Catatlina" ("I'm not listening anymore!"), "The Lady from Shanghai"'s quiet giddy-up, and the bells & whistles Casio circus in "Pure Love." All that's missing is the beautiful Juggernaut Press sleeve (but hey, there's a lovely picture of it in the booklet...). Transmissions to Horace is also contained. This is a 10-song album released on cassette only by Peter Hughes on his Sonic Enemy label in 1993, and this release alone, in our humble opinion, justifies the entire Ajax/3 Beads of Sweat Mountain Goats reissue campaign. This was an especially fertile period for John D., as evidenced by "Historiography," "Going to Cleveland," "Alpha Desperation March," "Teenage World," and the humble cover of the Commodores' "Sail On" that actually does the lyrics justice. Plus you now don't have to worry about the tape breaking. Also featured is the very rare (600 copies) Songs for Peter Hughes 7" originally released by the German label Sonic Squid in 1995, created by the John/Rachel lineup and more hi-fi than much of the previous output of theirs. This has a remake of "No, I Can't," the sole recorded appearance of the MGs' notorious cover of Ace of Base's "The Sign" (featured often during live sets of the same era), and a beautiful meditation on life/fame/? in "Song for Dana Plato." And fleshing out the album are a whole bunch of compilation tracks from releases on such labels as the now-defunct Walt label out of New York state; the now-defunct Sing, Eunuchs! label out of Omaha; Germany's Glitterhouse (one of the standout tracks, "Against Agamemnon"); the now-defunct Slowball cassette label out of Sweden (a live version of the *very* bitter "Black Molly"); the now-defunct Union Pole label out of Olympia ("Rain Song," in which John D. rhymes Allen Callaci with "hibachi"); the now-defunct Pottery label out of Swarthmore, PA; and the now-defunct Box Dog Sound out of Seattle (a great vein-popping "Faithless Bacchant Song"). A lot of great songs have been rescued from the dustbin of indie-rock history.
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Noche del Guajolote
Pitchforkmedia 10/2/02 (7.5 out of 10.0) From the Pitchfork Junior High production of "Waiting for Darnielle": Characters: [Setting: An abstract plane, duh. A skyline of CD cases. A tumbleweed sets itself on fire and rolls across the stage, where HAIRCUT and CHAIN-WALLET stroll and converse.] Haircut: Oh despair. How are we to describe three rarities anthologies by John Darnielle's Mountain Goats? What is left to be said about what Darnielle concocts with a paucity of ingredients: haphazardly recorded acoustic guitar, spoken-then-hyperharmonizing vocals, and of course, his tremulous soul, which he threatens to overexpose? We may as well have been asked to rhapsodize about a grilled cheese sandwich-- that treat similar to the Mountain Goats in that it is so much better than it should be, the consumption of which feels guiltless and light, despite its ominous cheesiness. But these CDs contain 185 minutes' worth of 81 songs. That's a geyser of simple sandwiches. Chain-Wallet: I too am inclined to despair. I owned these songs in their vinyl, cassette, and compilation CD formats, makeshift covers and all. I even bought a freestanding CD burner with an analog input jack to make my own rarities discs. My check to Sing Eunuchs, signed by Simon Joyner himself, is still taped to my ukulele. I even bought the original release of Protein Source of the Future... Now! and Bitter Melon Farm when Ajax originally released them in 1999. These songs have been with me too long. I feel as if I've been asked to discuss my own foot. Haircut: Dude, there's no way you had "Going to Kirby Sigston" because Hey Dan K never came out. What are you going to do with that archive of rarities now that these capsules exist? Chain-Wallet: That's why God made eBay. [Enter GOD.] God: Affiliate me not with the genesis of eBay. I resent the construction "that's why God made ________" when people just go on to cite something like flip-flops, Teddy Grahams, or condoms. My designs are much more complicated and counterintuitive-- grasshoppers, pineapples, tuberculosis. Sorry, I'm ranting. [Exit GOD.] Haircut: Perhaps the only strategy for comprehending these sacred texts would be for us to recount all that Darnielle has given us, even if we're made to feel like mere information-dispensers, or ATMs, in doing so. Chain-Wallet: Firstly, these screeds ain't chronological, yet each disc evokes its own Mountain Goats "period." With Protein Source of the Future... Now!, we've been offered mostly the warm, mellow, imagistic Darnielle. The songs amble through the speakers' doom-sap and analyze love's overpromises. The narrators are viziers of tiny, silly empires, and Darnielle knows it-- his liner notes indicate that they project "near-apocalyptic weight to their petty grievances." That's no slight; in fact, the best songs here function like slice-of-vexed-life short stories without resolutions. Haircut: Standouts include, but are not limited to, the annihilation-obsessed "Two Thousand Seasons", during which Darnielle is accompanied only by some kind of breezily buzzing whirligig, and "Billy the Kid's Dream of the Magic Shoes", a perfect example of Darnielle's singular penchant for clashing archetypes (here the outlaw-awaiting-death tradition meets a child's escapist fantasy). As the shortest of these three discs, and since it compiles several longer short projects (four-, five-, and eight-song releases), Protein plays like a mid-career full-length rather than a lost-back-catalog goulash. Chain-Wallet: Which brings us to the considerably less twilit, and less ingratiating, Bitter Melon Farm. Darnielle's notes admit that its songs are "strays" and that the bitterness in the title explicitly refers to how they might be swallowed. For some nebulous reason, this disc has an estate-sale grab-bag feel-- sure, you get a lot for your money, but a lot of what? Punctured hosepipes, plastic Christmas trees, and stained sweatpants? The limitations of the Goats's minimal formula are apparent here; even on the tracks that feature Darnielle's trusty boombox, the gears suggest a robo-cow chewing its robo-cud rather than an interesting no-fi texture. Haircut: Still, the listener is treated to "Going to Cleveland", in which the singer is tortured by his partner's big eyes, despite how dedicated he is to his arrival in that brown city of eternal afternoons. "No, I Can't" is included twice, and this song is representative of the Goats's knack for using material thangs as objective correlatives for emotions and temporal connections. On these songs, a gift of, say, a filing cabinet changes the giftee's life convincingly, articulating the way sheer "stuff" can grip us. And two stellar covers emerge: though The Commodores and Ace of Base may seem more flippant than Darnielle's standard reappraisal-fare (Chet Baker, Minutemen, Ella Fitzgerald, Robert Johnson, Steely Dan), "Sail On" and "The Sign" are solid numbers on a disc that occasionally feels vestigial. Some wool-gathering is afoot. Chain-Wallet: The muzzy attenuation of Bitter Melon Farm as a whole are nullified by the glory that is Ghana, truly the proverbial "one you've been waiting for". If you are among those hand-to-mouth loser-imps who only own one-third of 69 Love Songs, then Ghana is the ultimate Darnielle fraction for your fundamentally incomplete existence. The New Testament lords over this disc with fetching benevolence. As Darnielle works the underrated policies of Jesus and Paul into his purposefully un-epic tales of life-maintenance, the trademark Goats sententiousness peaks. With "Golden Boy", an ode to a brand of peanuts (from Object Lessons, an EP on which Franklin Bruno and the Vehicle Flips also acquit themselves marvelously), Darnielle blends his frisky materialism and spiritualism, all the while blending his claustrophobic sobriety with his absurdist wit. Haircut: My emotions are pretty much pickled, but "The Last Day of Jimi Hendrix's Life" sends me out to my balcony in Spanish Harlem, crying a slough of tears onto the chickens roaming the alley. The rousing history lesson "The Anglo-Saxons" is a gem, despite its admitted transgressions against facts. And "Anti-Music Song" reigns as it trashes Morrissey (whom Darnielle calls "Maureecey", and with whom he has since reconciled), the remaining Beach Boy, and, I'm guessing, the Counting Crows's Adam Duritz when he sings of a "bad imitation of Van Morrison." Chain-Wallet: The four songs fleshed out by Alaistar Galbraith are stunning. We can only hope that these violins are harbingers of the new Goats album that is days away from release, the album Darnielle insisted he'd never make, with a band (percussion-- gasp!) in a studio. Ghana is a damn relief pitcher: the capering guitars ideally suit the lyrics about introducing this manufactured world to the next, lyrics about "heading straight to hell/ In a Lincoln Continental." Probably one of the best and richest acoustic-only albums I own, and I own everything. All I do is own, actually. Haircut: Whew, we got worked up there. Oh well, back to our meaningless toil. Back to waiting for the new album. And to hoping the Goats will persevere. Chain-Wallet: Perseverance isn't always a good thing. Isn't it fucked up that the "The Price Is Right" is still making new episodes? [Enter DARNIELLE.] Haircut: Darnielle! Chain-Wallet: It is he who will not abate! Darnielle: It is I, Darnielle, who will not abate. My friends, I must ask: Now that you have these omnibuses, are you happy? Haircut: Um, well, where's the re-release of your amazing cassettes Hot Garden Stomp and The Hound Chronicles? Why deny the digital-minded consumer the glory of your cover of "Tell Me on a Sunday", or the heartbreak of "Going to Chino"? Chain-Wallet: And when will you free your absolutely captivating father-haunted masterwork New Asian Cinema from the ghetto of a 500-copy run of one-sided vinyl? We'd like to purchase it on CD to give to a date, in the event that a date came along. Darnielle: Ah, my friends. Proust wrote of artless art collectors and how they were eventually consumed by their consumption to the point that no opus can satiate them. Be patient. Maybe try a new food every other Wednesday. Memorize outdated maps. Just diversify your passions beyond the realm of the shrink-wrappable. [Exit DARNIELLE.] Haircut: But there will always be more CDs we need to buy. Chain-Wallet: There will always be more CDs we need to buy. Haircut: We will never be happy. Chain-Wallet: We will never be happy. [They smile.] -William Bowers
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