Word: songed
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...Ever since his first releases in the early ’90s, fans have admired the Mountain Goats for the sincerity that each song exudes, through lone permanent member Darnielle’s incisively concrete, yet erudite lyrics. This effect is multiplied by the raw sound of his unmediated recording techniques. As late as 2002’s “All Hail West Texas,” Darnielle recorded his albums on a boom box, and some of his early works remain available exclusively on audiocassette...
...Songs from this decade of lo-fi recording and prodigious songwriting mostly fall into certain series. One such series, dominated by song titles beginning with “Alpha,” develops the narrative of a couple entwined in a mutually destructive and inescapable relationship. “Tallahassee,” the group’s first album for label 4AD, arrived in 2002 as a culmination of this series, a concept album that tracks their attempts to salvage a failed marriage and the eventual divorce...
...Darnielle is anything but optimistic about love in his music. Perhaps his best-known insight on married life, the song “No Children,” features such self-destructive hysterics as “I hope the fences we’ve mended/fall down beneath their own weight, /and I hope we hang on past the last exit,/I hope it’s already too late...
...Glorious Noise interview by Jake Brown, Darnielle claims sincerity in this fiction, saying that “a carefully constructed song is the mark of a sincere songwriter, not a spilling-out of random un-retouched demons.” In a genre marked by endlessly self-referential artists aurally laying claim to the authenticity of their experience, Darnielle’s sincerity lies in his commitment to well-crafted falsehoods...
...Sunset Tree.” Studio-recorded (the latter in coordination with musician John Vanderslice) with a more refined sound and wider instrumentation, these albums have been received with reservations by fans accustomed to the raw truthfulness of previous work. In addition, both albums abandon the traditional song-series and their fictional narratives, telling instead an autobiographical account of Darnielle’s childhood. Writing closer to home, Darnielle drops the overbearing hysterics of the alpha-series lover for projections onto details of his childhood. Take despair: In “Tahallassee” our protagonist loses perspective, remarking...