The Mountain Goats

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Essential Albums

  • The Sunset Tree
    The Sunset Tree
    The Sunset Tree

    A captivating songwriter who has long used his imagination to shed light on the inner lives of misfits, from aging married folks to paranoid drug addicts, John Darnielle (the one constant member of this rotating ensemble) turns the microscope on himself for this unflinching look at his adolescence. Darnielle dedicates the album to his stepfather, an abusive drunk who made things difficult for his family. “Dance Music” spells out the angry tirades, glasses shattering, and a child hiding, with only music to block out the horror. “This Year” is Darnielle’s call to self-reliance (best line: “I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me”). Several other tunes replay difficult scenes, while others handle Darnielle’s other obsessions including reggae performer Dennis Brown’s weakness for cocaine. Many Mountain Goats albums were recorded under lo-fi conditions (basically, a Panasonic boombox). However, like many more recent MG collections, The Sunset Tree was recorded professionally and carefully uses the added fidelity to create a strong, never overpowering mood, with sawing strings accompanying Darnielle’s swiftly strummed acoustic guitar.

  • All Hail West Texas (Remastered)
    All Hail West Texas (Remastered)
    All Hail West Texas (Remastered)

    In 1989, John Darnielle paid $89 for a Panasonic RX-FT500 boombox—a long, skinny, black hulk of plastic and metal with a microphone wedged deep inside its missile-like body. Over the next decade, he would document detail-rich portraits of emotional disrepair by howling into that boombox in a barely intonated bleat over heavy acoustic strums. Still very much an underground figure, one best known to college-radio DJs and record-store obsessives, Darnielle’s The Mountain Goats would steadily become one of the most distinct projects in the American lo-fi community, with his Panasonic and his poignant tales making perfect partners for these songs from the abyss. His 2002 boombox masterpiece, All Hail West Texas, serves as the gripping culmination of a decade of singular music. It’s also one of the best singer-songwriter records ever committed to any medium. There are lines in All Hail West Texas perfectly suited for tattoos inked at the end or start of a romance—lines like “We were the one thing in the galaxy God didn’t have his eyes on,” or “I got sugar in the fuel lines, both of us do.” For any emo band, these would be career-defining lyrics. But for a storyteller like Darnielle, they’re simply bits of dialogue or plot points. All Hail West Texas is full of people desperately seeking whatever sanctuary they can find, whether it’s an imagined metal band that lets misfits escape their small-city blues; a house of exhausted refugees where no one asks questions; a love that lets you back in, even after the most extreme falling-out. It’s tempting to see All Hail West Texas as a concept album, as its references to Denton, Pecos, Austin, and “the West Texas Highway like a Möbius strip” suggest a lived-in atlas of a vast and often-overlooked American wonderland. But the real concept is one of survival. The characters here must endure the panic attacks that come with crossing state lines alone, or the worry about taking care of a newborn who shows up on “a strange wind all full of new smells.” Darnielle ends the album on “Absolute Lithops Effect,” his bent chords warped by the Panasonic. He sings about the pain he’s endured and the hope that he’s now made it to the other side—just like the desert succulents that survive because they look like rocks. “After one long, sweltering summer,” he promises, “I’m going to find the exit.”

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About The Mountain Goats

John Darnielle’s chief project has blossomed over several decades from lo-fi indie folk to lush, complex pop-rock that interrogates life’s biggest issues. The Mountain Goats began as a cassette-recorded concern and blossomed into a full band with 2002’s Tallahassee, which brought multi-instrumentalist Peter Hughes into the fold. Drummer Jon Wurster would join on 2008’s Heretic Pride, while other musicians such as guitarist Kaki King and songwriter Franklin Bruno have also been in The Mountain Goats’ mix over the years. But whether playing solo into a cassette recorder or performing while surrounded by strings and brass, Darnielle (born in 1967 in Bloomington, IN, and raised in California) has kept his tightly wound voice at The Mountain Goats’ centre. The singer-songwriter’s wail provides a fulcrum for his closely told tales about people dwelling on the edge: couples existing inside a powder keg of their own making (“No Children”), misunderstood youth (“The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton”), pro wrestlers hoping for a big payout (Beat the Champ).

FROM
Claremont, CA, United States
FORMED
2020
GENRE
Alternative

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