Guest List: Mountain Goats: Ten Records That Render Life Bearable...
...Whilst Simultaneously Making the World Seem Like a Malevolent and Overwhelming Place, and Two Activities That Fill Up the Endless River of Empty Hours That Flows Elegantly Before Me in a Cascading Arc Across the Horizon
Guest List by John Darnielle, Mountain Goats My wife has gone to California to visit her family and she won't be back for a week, and so I'm parked semi-permanently in front of the stereo, swilling vodka and chasing it down with hot black coffee. The music-at-high-volumes marathon lets up just long enough for twice-daily reruns of Law & Order, all of which I've seen at least three times each and can practically recite from memory; any remaining time is spent either writing songs about speed freaks who've locked themselves inside their south Pomona motel rooms and aren't going to come out unless they absolutely, positively have to go get more Cheetos, or constructing little handmade fetishes that pay tribute to the tenacity with which these extremely skinny people chase down their elusive dreams. Here are the particulars of what I'm doing:
1. The Mekons: Oooh!
Pretty easily one of the best records to come out this year, and probably the last push I'll need toward becoming totally obsessed with the Mekons, who are loved by more or less everyone I respect. What the Bad Seeds might sound like if Nick would just knock it off with those confounded piano ballads, already.
2. Steely Dan: Gaucho
It could as easily be Aja or Countdown to Ecstasy or Katy Lied, but for now it's Gaucho. People use words like 'mellow' when they talk about Steely Dan. People should be lined up and shot. Gaucho is as desperate a vision of the world as is available anywhere, knee-deep in cocaine and Jose Cuervo Gold, ironic not in our sad postmodern sense of the word but in the effusive ugly splendor that the term really implies, letter-perfect in every way. "Hey Nineteen," "Time Out of Mind," the unspeakable and devastating title track-- I can just barely stand it, and we're only two entries deep into the list. Good God.
3. Baby Dee: Love's Small Song
This album has a stranglehold on the living room. I can listen to anything I want as long as I play Baby Dee at least once a day. I want to play it in the morning, and again in the afternoon. These songs might pass for unearthed treasures from some clandestine songwriters' circle in Cleveland circa 1904 if the lyrics weren't so messed up. Some of these songs are genuinely frightening; all of them are ominously gorgeous.
4. Ice Cube: "Extradition" (from War and Peace Vol. 1: The War Disc)
Also the first three songs from N.W.A.'s Straight Outta Compton. Someday I will get around to drawing up my long-threatened diagram proving that Ice Cube is, in fact, William Blake. There will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
5. The Future Sound of London: Dead Cities
I am not a record collector; I am a hoarder of recorded sound media. The day will come when I don't even look at the records I buy-- I'll just go into the store, grab random things off the racks, and walk happy as a clam at high tide up to the cash register. I have two copies of this album:the standard-issue, and the one that came in a slipcase with a 196-page book filled with retina-burning fractured-brain images from the seventh circle of digital Hell. There is no hope for me. The music itself both causes and cures claustrophobia. Seven years I've had this thing and I still haven't gotten to the bottom of it. In'ya pas de hors-texte.
6. Clandestine Blaze: Fist of the Northern Destroyer
On the Northern Heritage label out of Finland, which, unbelievably, is not some pathetic bunch of pimply teenagers romanticizing the Waffen SS, but a label whose vision of pure underground metal unsullied by boring political affiliations is without parallel in the metal landscape. This is black metal. It is majestically harsh and completely lacking in commercial appeal. The temperature drops a palpable ten degrees when you play it. Awesome.
7. Palestine/Coulter/Mathoul: Maximin
This won't be released until the end of October, but once it comes out there are some stereos on which it will continue playing until time stops. Drone music from a composer named Charlemagne Palestine about whom lots of people apparently know lots of things and have lots of opinions. I'd never heard of him, but I played this thing at ridiculously high volume when I first got it and I almost saw God.
8. Crude little drawings on construction paper adorned with mildly foreboding sentences like "He Will Always Be the Champion" or "They Will Come to Establish Their Colony." Plenty of people take up painting; me, I like to hand-make little booklets and tuck them away in a shoebox where they'll never be seen again. There are twenty-two such booklets so far, and they're some of the best work I've ever done, and my plan is to bury them in the backyard when I've finished with them. In partial shade. Near the raspberry bushes.
9. The Stockholm Monsters: Alma Mater
Best album ever. BEST ALBUM EVER. BEST ALBUM EVER.
10. Lifter Puller: Fiestas and Fiascos
Very nearly as good as Alma Mater. Craig Finn's lyrics make everybody else's sound like amateur hour at the poetry slam. The band sounds like they're all possessed by the same demon. Incredible.
11. Maps of Mexico, Ecuador, and San Bernardino and Riverside Counties, spread out on the floor showing several possible escape routes from one place to another for the characters who populate the songs I'm writing now. Somebody should warn these people that Ecuador will not actually be the peaceful haven that they've talked themselves into believing it is. I can't be the one to do it because I have a personal stake in their downfall. Everybody is doomed. Warn the neighbors.
12. Little Walter: My Babe
A cassette on an Albuquerque label sublimely named "Creative Sounds Limited." No liner notes, no credits, just the barest bones: track listing and a barcode. Put me in front of an artifact like this and I'm like a junkie in a cough syrup factory. I am not a guy who generally thinks much about guitar tone or anything, but the sound of the electric guitar on this thing rivals some of the best Howlin' Wolf sides, to say nothing of the song where the harmonica distorts so badly that it makes ghosts appear by the windows. Features a voraciously romantic line which I plan on stealing: "You're so fine/ You're a fine, healthy thing." As Leviathan said to the sailor: Ahhhh.
February 23, 2007 03:26AM | Darnielle's top ten?
