For the Record

Author: Emily Temple

If you didn't know any better, you'd probably think that an EP entitled Satanic Messiah would be by some scary hardcore band or Marilyn Manson. But no, it was released by a band called the Mountain Goats. Do you know them? Notorious for stripped-down, tense storytelling by brilliant frontman John Darnielle, they are not at all a band that you would imagine printing 666 limited edition double-seven-inch Satanic Messiahs, just for fun. And yet this is what we have. Well, 665 copies to be exact, as the last copy goes to Darnielle himself. To top it all off, they are available only at live Mountain Goats shows. The album, however, became available to you and everyone Oct. 9, in true Radiohead style, at http://satanicmessiah.com. On Darnielle's blog, he writes, "The downloads will be open to everybody, with no hoops to jump through, though there will also be several options available for those who want to pay me for my work, since part of the point of the exercise is to see whether that's a viable route for smaller-potatoes-than-Radiohead dudes like me. But we'll cross that bridge when we drive the frightened horses across it. With their covered wagons behind them on fire. And the devil, scrawny and crazed, riding behind them on an Italian greyhound." He calls required payment for downloads "weasel business" and urges you to share. Take that, record industry. The new generation of fans won't be charged for their goods! And share you should, because this EP is worth a lot more than the nothing it costs.

One of my main issues with Heretic Pride, the Mountain Goats' Feb. release, was what I considered the overbearing musical element. I fell in love with the Mountain Goats because of Darnielle's lyrical brilliance. At the same time, I was distracted by the lack of space and the lack of emphasis on the stories and images, which to me are the point and joy of the band. The Satanic Messiah EP is more to my liking, full of space even to the point where the breaks between songs are disconcertingly long. They are passionate and intense, featuring those black key background augmentations that are so typical of the Mountain Goats.

Darnielle hopes we like his songs. He says, "I am fond of them; they remind me of old vanished things," and nothing could really describe them better. These stories are set in churches, concert halls or both, where boys howl like wolves and have black bandages over their eyes.

To the attentive listener, Darnielle is a little bit like an exceptionally secretive lover. He is poignant, metaphoric and woefully fascinating. And as such a lover, part of the joy of listening to his music comes from putting two and two together, from hearing the echo of one story in another, the same phrases pressed upon you like scribbled love notes, sweaty palm to sweaty palm. One such moment of recognition comes in "Sarcofago Live," one of the two songs on the album that seems to be pointedly about the hero worship of musician, in which the hometown musicians look down at their neighborhood fans and one group calls out to the other, "all of you all of you, rage rage rage." It's not clear who's talking to who, an undoubtedly planned confusion, but the "all of you all of you" can't help but trigger an emotional reaction similar to the one elicited by "Idylls of the King", one of the stellar tracks off of 2002's Tallahasse, when Darnielle croons, "all of them all of them" to the same tune and in the same cadence. Maybe it brings some meaning to this new song that six years ago "all of them all of them" were clay pigeons, locusts, innumerable gibbons and bad ideas, and now they're musicians, worshipping fans, or perhaps both. Or maybe it's just that I'm an English major and I'm trained to make connections where they may or may not exist.