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A clock-measured 2:00AM won't seem bigger than other hours; experience alone convinces you of its power to grow long, into loops ignited by small bad thoughts. It's waker's choice - need to mow the lawn, leave her, tell them all the truth? You're safe here to sift it through. Gather up records and vices for the dark duration and forget that Zopilote Machine tried to warn you: there are worse things to lose than sleep.
Because then the fucking sun comes up, and yeah, morning sounds alot like first track "Alpha Incipiens." This is John Darnielle's Southern California but it's yours, too, when you've felt how daylight can be a broomstick to the windpipe. The first Mountain Goats LP starts with daytime's inescapable beating and bleaching, pounded out in strident strums. Christ, the things that make hearts bleat for shade. Now 14 years old, Zopilote Machine suggests it was the songwriter's gift from the get-go to tell the truths of waking life. No more of this coffee house crap about night-blossoming pain, Darnielle can't give day that kind of break, and why should he? What's day ever really done for any of us?
On this early album, the sun and its high-noon companions (hey, like the Zopilote itself, a desert vulture) blasts into all of the cracks that the Mountain Goats will later probe with defter fingers. The furnace of "Orange Ball of Love" and "Orange Ball of Hate" melts and halts and shines down on powerlessness of youth, the ticking clock ugliness of intimacy, and the loss of both. It's all here, but the knowing's just the half; Darnielle's whole, forgiving truth, is that the humans in this muck aren't the pieces, they're the paste. The LP and those to follow show us the authentic specifics of this world, and we're the best of it, showing up to these dawns, fighting towards twilight, and carrying one another home.
For Jeffrey Lewis the guitar is the telephone, microphone, megaphone. It's all just transit for words and he has plenty, boy, packing the cars and jumping the rails, surprising, straightforward with optimistic specifics about the ways we live in the world.
Played live these words come with pictures projected and painted on sheets, but the draw is still his spoken-sung story - of politics, love, age, and the occasional disembodied giant brain.
On 12 Crass Songs, Jeffrey filters hard-line punk through anti-folk mesh, gently sifting out the anger from fine grade indignation.
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I get about 15 MOG email alerts a day...one only yours ends up in the Spam folder...what's that about?
Love the song...he sounds like a much more intelligent version of Adam Green...so the rest of the record has this same quirky goodness too it?
It was almost just us when Blair went on at 8:30, one girl on a dirty bar stage. Lit from above by flashbulbs that spell "salvation," she says thanks for coming early, I'm going to play a few songs for you and then she does, straightaway.
Her voice feels for the pitch, god, I almost cringe just with hope, it's such a display of earnest courage. A few unsteady notes and she cracks, cracks but then blooms, warm & hollow, wavering like a memory in the far reaches. So lovingly vulnerable it turns me back to my beer, blushing and measuring my own mettle.
Incurious arrivals, here for the bigger draws, chatter in the rear - they'll wait to be told what's good, unwittingly armed against what's great. Giving up their shot at finding true love.
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I have been listening to 'Mona Lisa' over and over and over again...the vulnerability in her voice is staggering...
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"the most remarkable thing about you standing in the doorway is that it's you"
:-)
Artfully done, n. Same with the album, I'd surmise.
Every night I yearn for night to never end. I know this cannot be, but I believe in my ability to carry the night forward if only within myself. This never works, however. But I soon pledge myself to the task again.