The Mountain Goats - Beat the Champ - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

From Peter Hughes of The Mountain Goats InchThe theme this time around is goth, a subject closer to my heart perhaps than that of any Mountain Goats album previous. And while John writes the songs, as he always has, it feels more than ever like he's speaking for all of us in the band, erstwhile goths (raises hand) or otherwise, for these are songs that approach an identity most often associated with youth from a perspective that is inescapably adult. InchAnyone old enough to have had the experience of finding oneself at sea in a cultural landscape that's suddenly indecipherable will empathize with Pat Travers showing up to a Bauhaus show looking to jam, for example. But underneath the outward humor, there is evident throughout a real tenderness toward, and solidarity with, our former fellow travelers - the friends whose bands never made it out of Fender's Ballroom, the Gene Loves Jezebels of the world - the ones whose gothic paths were overtaken by the realities of life, or of it's opposite. InchIt's something we talk about a lot, how fortunate and grateful we are to share this work, a career that's become something more rewarding and fulfilling than I think any of us could have imagined. We all know how easily it could've gone the other way, and indeed for a long time did.Inch

Bleed Out is all pent-up energy and explosion, executed by a bunch of friends who were mainly happy to be in a room together making loud noises. In January 2021, just weeks after Darnielle had started writing, his bandmates Peter Hughes, Matt Douglas, and Jon Wurster joined him at a studio in the woods near his home in Chapel Hill. Everything was finished inside a week.

Originally released in October 2000, The Coroner's Gambit finds John Darnielle between physical and sonic spaces, five of it's sixteen songs recorded in Simon Joyner's Omaha, Nebraska, studio, five more at home in Colo, Iowa, and the rest in Ames. The album came together slowly; The Mountain Goats had released music every year from 1991 to 1998, but between the of that year's New Asian Cinema EP and The Coroner's Gambit, 1999 passed without an official Mountain Goats . The additional time that went into The Coroner's Gambit paid off It is a breakthrough for Darnielle as a songwriter and practitioner of the full-length album. His characters are sharply drawn, the immaculately appointed lore of the worlds they occupy providing them some shelter from the storm. He has grown as a guitarist and in voice, wringing moments of sweetness and humor from songs of fury and lament, nimbly modulating from mourning to longing, passing air through the lungs of the dead and survivors alike. The mix of home and studio recordings, songs where Darnielle's only accompaniment is his guitar and the whirr of his boombox and songs featuring additional instrumentation (banjo, percussion), grants The Coroner's Gambit a thrilling sense of immediacy while pointing towards a future that is soon to break open with All Hail West Texas and Tallahassee. The Coroner's Gambit is a masterpiece in it's own right, an introspective epic that further burnishes Darnielle's reputation as one of our greatest songwriters, one whose gift for confessional fabulism knows few rivals. In the ensuing years since it's original , The Coroner's Gambit has become somewhat tricky to pin down in it's entirety. Releasing the CD for the segment of The Mountain Goats massive who just wanted the songs, and the LP for those drawn to the ephemera of the album as a package, original vinyl copies were housed in a paper bag tha