listen to Resonant Bell World on Grooveshark
[0:00] - [0:27] - Blunt, primitive acoustic guitar. No need for anything else. This is one of the things I love about the Mountain Goats of days gone by, no matter how much "better" their records may have become since. The indie music world is stuffed full of guitarists who aren't great guitarists, but John Darnielle might be the greatest of them.
[0:27] - [1:26] - The narrator berates the object of his affections1 for her failure to behave like a normal person should behave. He is sarcastic, yet seemingly resigned; this is probably how things are going to be for a long time yet. There is an outbreak of violence, threaded through as always with affection, or attraction, or whatever these characters always have to tie them together, and it's still hard to believe that he really minds.
But I don't care about all that.2 What I do care about is this next part:
[1:27] - [1:30] - "Between you and me", Darnielle sings. What Mountain Goats fan3 has never felt a Mountain Goats song speak to them on such a crucial, personal level that it can only be a direct communication from JD himself?
[1:30] - [1:31] - Next he appears to drop the performance altogether in favour of a wry, conversational aside. If previously we were glowing with the illusory sense that John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats has something to share with us and us alone, now he is right on the other side of the room and we are positively incandescent. The upper-register vocal straining vanishes, and he admits: "it was — it was really exciting."
It is worth mentioning that the saving grace of many an horrific situation in the Mountain Goats catalogue is the exhilaration, or camaraderie, or just plain good things that Darnielle's characters find despite (or thanks to) the fact that everything is terrible.
[1:32] - [2:00] - More arms-length criticism and hyperbole, but I think we all know by now that there is not going to be an ultimatum, or an apology, or indeed any consequences at all.
[2:00] - [2:11] - This is the kind of broken-record moment I can really get behind. For the first time, the song feels like its title. It conjures up the feeling of being so inescapably a part of reality that you are practically vibrating with it. Like a confused human version of a singing wine glass , or a concrete slab being broken up by a jackhammer.
[2:12] - [2:36] - I love the way the Mountain Goats never shy away from the instrumental outro, even when it's just solitary, determined guitar hammering at two chords for another thirty seconds or so.
- Make no mistake: that is whom (grammer) he is addressing. [↩]
- Actually, that's a lie, but this is my fifth attempt to write about this song, and if I try to write about everything in it that I care about I will never get to the important part. [↩]
- And here I mean the bootleg-downloading, lyric-memorising, oeuvre-blog-writing kind of fan. The kind of fan whose internal jukebox rarely plays anything else. Let's face it, we're all that kind of fan sometimes.
Well, I am. [↩]
I have a question: do you often think thoughts like these* about Mountain Goats songs when you aren't trying to write about them?
*I refer to the articles in general, not just this one.
All the time (which is a large part of the reason why I started writing them), although rarely in any form even this structured and coherent (which is a large part of the reason why it takes me so long to write them).