“New” Mountain Goats brightened up my week considerably

Okay, so it's not new but it's new to me

This week, The Mountain Goats put out a record for this month's Bandcamp Friday at the low, low price of pay-what you want (it's still there if you missed it, but now it's pay-what-you-want-but-at-least-$5), and READER, I am pretty jazzed about it.

It's not really a new record, it's actually old (1999), from the first phase of The Goats, before the Goats were a band. This one is mostly a solo thing for John Darnielle, though Lalitree Darnielle, John's spouse, does some lovely work on the banjo for the first couple of songs. What's more, these 5 songs (originally put out on tape) have been accessible to the truly diehard on YouTube, but I missed them somehow.

If you know anything about The Mountain Goats, you might know that 2002 was sort of the magic year for them – that year, John and co. put out two records: the solo All Hail West Texas and the comparatively ornate Tallahassee. Up until then, starting from the mid-90s, all of the Goats' stuff had been sort of sparsely attended by collaborators, and largely recorded in ramshackle fashion, with whatever tooling happened to be around. Most notably, lots of the early stuff was recorded on a Panasonic boombox, which is very audible when used, and remains an object of near-obsession for longtime fans. All Hail West Texas, with the grind and whine of the Panasonic, is the triumphant end of this earlier era, all yelps and three-chord yellers, whereas Tallahasee and those that follow see John and his more stable set of collaborators broadening their palette, to great effect.

I'm a huge fan of both Goat eras – most fans are – but I'm probably a little warmer than some folks on their most recent stuff. I'm a total sucker for everything he's doing of late – last year's Bleed Out is just a joy, and I don't think he's ever put out a bad record. I guess I'm saying that I've never found myself rueing the day that John Darnielle hired bandmates and found a studio – most of my listening week-to-week is post-2002, not the boombox-era stuff. It's not that I'm skeptical of the old stuff – I just might think that some of the mystique is a little overblown.

But, surpising no one, the 11 minutes of New Asian Cinema cut through me like a knife. Only one song is on the Panasonic, and it's pretty amazing to hear the urgency of early John unfiltered through the crunch and fuzz. I actually think it's not a terrible place to start, if you are unitiated! Most folks suggest listening to All Hail West Texas and Tallahasee, and listening to the early stuff if Texas does it for you, and vice versa if you prefer Tallahassee. But even that's a pretty good commitment – who has an hour and change to close-listen to a new band these days? The 11 minutes of this thing weirdly approximate both sides of the divide, due to songs with- and without the Panasonic. Like, Cao Dai Blowout is as good in my mind as any other Goats song at encapsulating the experience.

The lyric is wistful, concise, heartrending, the banjo really does it for me, and the whole thing packs a serious punch for only a couple of minutes long, foreshadowing a personal, intimate well that John wouldn't return to quite like this in my mind until The Sunset Tree in the mid-2000s.

We're pretty lucky to be on year 20-whatever of the John Darnielle experience.