PrettyFakes

I am still covering myself in glory in my noble struggle to resist listening to any tracks from the forthcoming Mountain Goats’ album Get Lonely—I read that it’s a quiet, contemplative affair likely, as MG bassist Peter Hughes put it on his LiveJournal page, to “ruin your summer.” No one wants that. But in the meantime, I’ve been getting a lot of mail asking me to list my top ten favorite Mountain Goats songs. Or at least, I haven’t been getting any mail asking me not to do that, unlike the mail I was getting about the frequent Doom Patrol posts a few weeks ago. You post about gorilla sex a few times and people get all bent out of shape. (Here I am tempted to say “But not as much as they would be if they were having gorilla sex!” But that sort of thing is beneath me.)

Anyway, so here it is. This list makes no claims to represent anything but by own persistently shifting tastes, modified by my desire not to pick anything popular enough to be a Mountain Goats encore staple and by my choice to include no more than one song from each album. I might come up with a different list tomorrow, with these songs in a different order, or with none of these songs, or organized using integers from beyond the set of real numbers.

10. “Noche Del Guajalote” (Bitter Melon Farm). Notable for being one of the very first Mountain Goats songs I ever heard, owing to the fact that it’s the first track on Bitter Melon Farm, the first MG album I ever picked up, mostly on a whim, at the Disc Exchange in Knoxville TN. I couldn’t have started with anything more beguiling: John and the Bright Mountain Choir weave a tale of tentative love and the alternating electrical currents—terrifying and magical by turns—that accompany your first overnight stay with your significant other’s parents. Which is to say, it’s about sleeping lovers menaced by a wild turkey.

9. “Prana Ferox” (Sweden). I love this song for the drama of John Darnielle’s vocal performance: he sings the first verse in a flat, affectless monotone that allows Rachel Ware to blindside the listener with the unexpected sweetness of her harmonizing on the verse’s final words; the spastic guitar solo that follows foreshadows the desperation that creeps into Darnielle’s voice in the second verse, and when Ware comes in again, she sings in blithe denial of the clear-to-everyone-else fact that her partner has become unhinged, mad-scientist style.

8. “Genesis 19: 1-2.” (Devil in the Shortwave). There’s a whole subgenre of Mountain Goats songs which you could accurately characterize as John-and-an-electric. All of them are great, so which one to pick? “Down Here” is a perennial favorite, and there was a period where all I wanted to do was listen to “Full Flower,” but something about this flash-fiction about fleeing on the eve of destruction, with its catalog of all those soon to be crispy-fried in the coming conflagration, grabs me every time.

7. “Twin Human Highway Flares” (Full Force Galesburg). Does anyone do bittersweet as well as The Mountain Goats? Let me answer that for you: No. Combine some perfectly crafted romantic moments with a frank acknowledgment of the inevitability of forgetting those moments, and end up with a song in which the speaker realizes that the most he can offer, and the best he can hope for, is the unkeepable promise that he will outlive his memory of those moments as briefly as possible.

6. “Noctifer Birmingham” (Ghana). Because it’s the saddest song ever recorded, that’s why.

5. “I Corinthians 13: 8-10” (Nothing for Juice). The song that proves you don’t have to be a reclusive eccentric to write a great tune about doomed love in WW2-era Poland. This is a lesson that certain of our indie rock icons, as well as their devout followers, would do well to learn so maybe then they can all get over themselves just a little.

4. “Southwood Plantation Road” (Tallahassee). MP3 HERE. Some songwriters would have written that bit at the end of the second verse, about living in a “house like a Louisiana graveyard / where nothing ever stays buried,” and called it a day. Not John Darnielle, who carries the idea another 50 yards or so, so that we get a few lines about well-dressed zombies on judgment day. If Darnielle gets back into the business of doing song-series, I’d like to hear at least an EP’s worth about these zombies.

(This Louisiana zombie does go on the obligatory rampage of destruction, but then he ends up working the ticket booth at a horror flick theater in Arkansas, so things could’ve gone a lot worse. Or could they? From the minds of Alan Moore and Steve Bissette, and, more specifically, from Swamp Thing: The Curse.)

3. “Jaipur” (The Coroner’s Gambit). Yeah, yeah, it’s the obvious pick off Coroner’s, but it’s just that I’m actually terrified that this song might stab me in my sleep if I don’t include it. I’m taking a big enough risk as it is just with not putting it at number one. It’s a scary song, is what I’m saying, all menace and marching dread. You know how for years you heard about how creepy Robert Mitchum is in Night of the Hunter, and then you finally got around to renting Night of the Hunter, and he was creepy until towards the end when he starts seeming kind of bumbling and incompetent and more like a Scooby-Doo villain? OK, this song is like if, at the end of the movie, instead of Mitchum getting bested by a couple of precocious brats, what happens is that Mitchum’s skin splits open and a tentacled abomination with bat-wings and a bird’s beak bursts out and extracts Lillian Gish’s eyeballs in long, sticky strands. It also inspired the very first post I ever did, so it’s got that going for it.

2. “The Mess Inside” (All Hail West Texas). With so many great disintegrating relationship songs to choose from in the Mountain Goats catalog, why this one? Because of this line: “a weekend in Utah won’t fix what’s wrong with us.”

1.5 “Up the Wolves” (The Sunset Tree).
1.25 “Cao Dai Blowout” (New Asian Cinema).

1. “Quito” (We Shall All Be Healed). I can’t stay away from this potentially unsurpsassable two minutes of greatness. Here are the things that are not named in this song but which are nonetheless clearly present in its world: Burned coffee, stale Hydrox, two-day stubble, and creaky folding chairs in the church basement on a Tuesday night. Perhaps the greatest triumph of the Mountain Goats’ studio phase (up to that point). The second verse of this song is perfect. Thank you Nora Danielson for that bit with the strings. That is all.

Because there are no decent versions of any of these songs on YouTube, please enjoy this video of “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton.” Or else.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 5th, 2006 at 9:52 pm and is filed under Professor Fury, The Rock and The Roll. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.