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The Mountain Goats

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Description

The Mountain Goats is a prolific, principally one-man band, which is comprised of John Darnielle on guitar and vocals. Why is one man The Mountain Goats? He has such power and ability that transforms The Mountain Goats into a neuter plural collective noun with reverse rationale--plural noun, single man--with the English definite article. From time to time, other musicians have made songs with him, but Darnielle is the essential "Mountain Goat". The Mountain Goats are an important fixture of the lo-fi style of music (despite recently putting out several studio albums), having frequently recorded on an 80s boombox and releasing all early work exclusively on cassette tape.

Biography

John Darnielle was born in Bloomington, Indiana, during one of the state's periodic locust infestations. His family drove out to California in a blue Chrysler convertible with John, as yet unable to walk or speak, riding in the back. He spent most of the next twenty-odd years in and around California, buying Gun Club albums and weird Hawaiian guitars from a couple of blind brothers who ran a music store in a strip mall in Norwalk, California. This sounds like it must be a lie, but, surprisingly, it isn't.

California's position as Last State Before You Fall Off The Edge Of The World looms large in Darnielle's songs, which he for the most part wrote in Iowa, entirely landlocked for the first time since his infancy. Taking the name from the Screaming Jay Hawkins song "Big Yellow Coat," Darnielle donned the Mountain Goats moniker in 1991 while working as a nurse in a California State hospital. He Released music as The Mountain Goats in various permutations. First, released as a quintet including Rachel Ware and the Bright Mountain Choir(even at times with the North Mass Mountain Choir), then later as a duo. Often he recorded by himself, in fact a good portion of all tracks feature only Darnielle's nasal bleat and his primitive, yet frenzied, acoustic guitar. He presently records with bassist and multi-instrumentalist Peter Hughes (Nothing Painted Blue, Diskothi-Q) -- since 1992, Darnielle's songs generally dwell on one or a combination of five subjects: conflicts within relationships that lead to irreducible contradictions, food, water, the mythology of pre-Columbian Mexico, and animals that can talk. This list changes every time you ask him about it but the talking animals are usually in there. His early tapes on the Shrimper label were aggressively low-tech presentations, recorded on a Panasonic RX-FT500, a dual-cassette with built-in condenser microphone that doesn't condense. The brilliant engineers designing it also played the microphone next to the cassette wheels, the source of the "wheelgrind" noise that is present in many of the recordings. The boombox is a classic example of machinery taking on and embuing organic qualities. No one could duplicate it's ferocity in a studio. For Darnielle's own encomium to his old friend, see the excellent liner notes of "All Hail West Texas".. Lots of people insisted on calling the work made using the Panasonic "4-track recordings," and trying to convince people otherwise has proven utterly pointless.

Since 1994, the general rule has been for The Mountain Goats albums to feature a mixture of home-recorded and studio songs. Early 2002 saw the release of "All Hail West Texas," the first all-boombox Mountain Goats album since 1994's Zopilote Machine." In November of 2002, "Tallahassee" found Darnielle and Hughes using great big pieces of equipment, and use full potential of studio production, to conjure an album for the first time, completely in a studio. That album was the first of a trio of albums(Tallahassee, We Shall All Be Healed, and The Sunset Tree) to be released on 4ad records.

Discography

Full-length recordings

Singles

EPs, 10"s, one-sided 12"s

Compilations

  • Ghana - CD (3 Beads of Sweat, 2002)

Other compilation appearances

  • "Noche del Guajolote" on I Like Walt - 7" EP (Walt, 1994)
  • "Flight 717: Going to Denmark" and "The Admonishing Song" on Corkscrewed - cassette (Theme Park, 1995)
  • "The Last Day of Jimi Hendrix's Life" on Cool Beans #4 7" EP (Cool Beans, 1995)
  • "Creature Song" and "Pure Sound" on Goar #11 - 7" EP (Goar, 1995)
  • "Going to Kirby Sigston" on Hey Dan K. (Ajax, unreleased)

Cassettes

Side projects

THE CONGRESS (with Mark Givens and others)

THE EXTRA GLENNS (with Franklin Bruno)

The Extra Glenns Compilation Appearances

  • "I Hear the Planets" on Fantasy Band - 7" EP (Shrimper, 1994)

THE SENECA TWINS (with Lalitree Chavanothai and Chris Butler)

THE BLOODY HAWAIIANS (with Joel Huschle, Mark Givens, and Caroline)

The Bloody Hawaiians compilation appearances

Sources

External links


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