Send "The Mountain Goats " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Tinymixtapes |
 Much has been written about the boombox of The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle. The machine acted as the minuscule recording studio for early Mountain Goats albums, which featured Darnielle alone on guitar and vocals. Each track on these records begins with a click, followed by the familiar hum of Panasonic gears. These sounds, as well as the records’ overall lo-fi white noise, lend early Darnielle recordings a sense of voyeurism. Even when seemingly fictional, his songs are deeply personal. The boombox technique adds to this feel; the singer’s simple, propulsive guitar playing completes it.Of early Mountain Goats records, All Hail West Texas features Darnielle at his most confident. These songs are so well-written that more detailed production would have clouded their brilliance. The first track, “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton,” manages to squeeze disappointment, humor, and vivid storytelling into two-and-a-half minutes. It’s the story of Cyrus and Jeff, the only members of a metal band that may or may not be called Satan’s Fingers, The Killers, or The Hospital Bombers. The story, with friends dreaming of “stage lights and Learjets,” is familiar to anyone who has started a band. Darnielle, over lilting 6/8 time, sings the song’s conclusion with straightforward earnestness: “The best ever death metal out of Denton will in time outpace and outlive you/ Hail Satan.”...full text |
| Stylusmagazine. |
| Ican summarize everything I know about West Texas in one sentence: I-40 spans about 200 miles of it, one of its major cities is Amarillo, it's moderately populated, and it's relatively undistinguished, even for the Midwest. I know these things because it just so happens I've driven through there three times in the past two years as part of my semiannual collegiate commute between California and North Carolina. But despite perhaps having more knowledge of West Texas than the average Mountain Goats reviewer, my memory and general opinion of the area have been dulled by the crusty-eyed, detached world view that characterizes transnational car travel. Consequently, I have very little of interest to say about West Texas; however, chief (and incidentally, only) Mountain Goat John Darnielle apparently found enough inspiration there for fourteen tracks of lo-fi literary melancholy. Just as the naked eye indicates there's not much in West Texas, All Hail West Texas at first listen sounds bare and insubstantial, not to mention primitively recorded. Sure, we all know what lo-fi sounds like, but you (the average soundcard-equipped reader) wouldn't need Steve Albini to trump Darnielle and his K-Mart boombox in the production department. In theory, anyone could do what Darnielle does given his setup: his acoustic guitar progressions, while affecting, require only a basic knowledge of chords to play; his voice is untrained, nasal and only marginally tuneful; and as for the omnipresent tape hum. . . well, that's as easy as not using the proper bandpass filter. But the lo-fi aesthetic suits the Mountain Goats particularly well, as its minimalism and lack of polish create the perfect backdrop for Darnielle's stark tales of small-town tragedy and disappointment....full text |
| Pitchfork |
| Remember 'audio cassettes'? Remember the days when the pre-digital Walkman was criticized as the most isolating and therefore masturbatory form of self-entertainment since the novel? Remember snickering about needing to buy 'head cleaner'? Remembering sacramentally disemboweling the "I Love You Forever: The Supermix" tape of a partner whose behavior later revealed that they were obviously disingenuous about the loving-you-forever thing? If only I had a turtleneck for every date that ended when, after showing me her new tattoo of the Chinese symbol for 'woman' that she still hid from Dad, the girl coyly asked what was in that big black trunk at the foot of my bed-- only to learn that it was full of releases from cassette-only labels. One even sneered, "I don't even know how to use a cassette," as if they were a worse misappropriation of plastic and the means of mass production than oversized "We're #1" hands for winless football teams. As big an oddball on the underground landscape as Stephin Merritt, Mountain Goat John Darnielle understands how to harness the majesty of the practically aborted cassette format. He appeared on nearly every cassette-only label's compilation during their golden era of Xerox-ed and Crayola-ed cover art, and released his band's first three proper albums of passionate nasal-fi straight to tape. A zillion vinyl releases and ten CDs later, and the Goats have offered the world what 'they' would have us believe is the highest-profile concept album ever recorded on a jambox, complete with grinding gears that sound like Darnielle rigged a stethoscope to the saliva glands of a retired android. And despite consistently featuring more hey's, la's and whoa's than Ringo Starr's spiral lyric notebook (hanging on the wall of the Hard Rock Cafe in Bent Musket, Georgia, if you want to check it out), Darnielle's yelled lyrics continue to pierce layers of the listener's inner ice. Foes of profane merriment beware: the chorus of "Jenny" employs a "hi-diddle-dee-dee-goddamn." Who else could, with only an abused acoustic guitar accompanying him, pull off a line as prosaic as, "We tried to fight the creeping sense of dread with temporal things"?...full text |
The Mountain Goats lyrics
