![]() ![]() Piles of broken bricks/ Signposts on the pathĮvery moment points toward/ The aftermath Ballard does half as well with ten times as many words in his novel Crash:įog lifts from the harbour/ Dawn goes down todayĪn agent crests the shadows/ Of a nearby alleyway ![]() The final figure/image is a keeper, something J. (any suggestions from our readers would be welcome here). I write down good reasons to freeze to death/ In my spiral ring notebook,įrom Heretic Pride (2008), we have ‘Sax Rohmer #1’, which is about something lovely, though I have no idea what that might be. Half-eaten gallons of ice cream in the freezer/ Fresh fuel for the sodium flares, ’36 Hudson in the garage/ All sorts of junk in the unattached spare room,ĭishes in the kitchen sink/ New straw for the old broom,įriends who don’t have a clue/ Well-meaning teachers,įloor two foot high with newspapers/ White carpet thick with pet hair, Eliot so memorably called (in The Waste Land) ‘a heap of broken images’, though Eliot would never have used such charmingly domestic visuals: I will walk down to the end with you/ If you will come all the way down with meĪgain, in ‘Broom People’ ( The Sunset Tree), Darnielle builds a love song out what T. Like the searchlights in the parking lots of hell In the way those eyes I’ve always loved illuminate this place In the skin on my face/ In the weak last gasp of the evening’s dying light I can feel it in the rotten air tonight/ In the tips of my fingers I want to say I’m sorry for stuff I haven’t done yet/ Things will shortly get completely out of hand … From the entrance to the exit/ Is longer than it looks from where we stand For your pleasure, pondering, and perhaps confusion, a few of The Mountain Goats’ greatest (or most evocative) leaps in both language and logic.įrom ‘Old College Try’ ( Tallahassee), Darnielle manages to weave an oddly romantic metaphor out of a series of random images that would not be out of place in a Murakami Haruki novel: One of the things that makes The Mountain Goats such a pleasure to listen to is the fact that, not unlike writers like the philosopher/cultural critic Jean Baudrillard, the novelist Chuck Palahniuk, and the great theologian/existentialist/madman Søren Kierkegaard, Darnielle relies almost exclusively on indirect forms of communication, approaching and constructing his worlds of meaning from every conceivable angle, no matter how oblique. Darnielle’s massive output has included such masterpieces as Tallahassee (a 2003 concept album about divorce), The Sunset Tree (2005), and the recent The Life Of The World To Come (2009), a fascinating slice of reception history that features 12 songs inspired by individual verses from the canonical Bible (The Mountain Goats website can be found here). This has coincided with a mild (and growing) obsession with the great indie rock band The Mountain Goats, the pen name of the singer and songwriter John Darnielle and whoever he happens to be working with. ![]()
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