"Damn These Vampires" by The Mountain Goats (Merge Records, 2011)

The words to this song sound like they've come straight out of the Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy; wild, tormented, restless characters ravaged by whatever they've been through and overcast with the harsh reality.they're living in. The new song on the Mountain Goats (pictured left) album is what I was hoping for; a darker take on the human experience. I'm hoping for dark, clouded skies, characters who feel like they can't escape but manage to hold on to something anyway.... raw appeal is the promise, and if this release is anything to go by the new record, All Eternals Deck, due to be released on the 29th March 2011 on Merge Records, will be steered right along that course.

The album itself I intend to review upon release. In the mean-time the new song is available here and is very much worth listening to. The Stereogum article is also fantastic...

http://stereogum.com/620041/the-mountain-goats-damn-these-vampires-stereogum-premiere/mp3s/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Delirium and Drift

“I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort”  - Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star It is so unnatural to even return here, after so much. One might question returning to an old haunt, where everything has been so long dead, but there is a debt which cannot be forfeited, a collapsing star back then that went unnoticed. These past years have passed by in such an unclear manner that I may even have forgotten that I was living, merely existing in this loose fabric of time, stuttering out the minor parts of a much longer story. Ever since I can remember it was this way; losing footing, losing my way because of some underlying suffering that I could never resolve. It expressed itself uncannily, through a high bound empathy with all suffering, it brought me down, it dictated the terms of a reality that was incompatible with actual reality. Two worlds; that of the impossible dream and the actual realities where emotional resilience is not so commonplace. So let me be v...
Read more about it »

Memory

An exquisite memory, elegant in how even it remembers its tangents, its dreams upon waking. Just as in literature there are not only words on the page but words between words, tiny effervescences and ruptures as an unlikely pairing signifies deeper inwards. Foster Wallace on the novelist Marcel Proust: "Over the next four summers I got to see way more of the state than is normal or healthy, albeit most of this seeing was a blur of travel and crops, looking between nod-outs at sunrises abrupt and terribly candent over the crease between fields and sky (plus you could see any town you were aimed at the very moment it came around the earth's curve, and the only part of Proust that really moved me in college was the early description of the kid's geometric relation to the distant church spire at Combray), riding in station wagons' backseats through Saturday dawns and Sunday sunsets." - Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley , David Foster Wallace This caught my eye, n...
Read more about it »

"Are All Humans Hedonists?"

Before I settle into something different, read some Francois Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel and hope from the same or similar experience as when I read Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, there's a question to be answered which sent me to sleep the other night with the question: Why speak? I had written elusively on this epiphany the other night whilst watching Oldboy, a film about repressed desire, desire repressed from the outside, through hypnosis and through diminishing the reality of the prisoner, this constant repetition of two dimensional television avatars suggesting escape, but actually reinforcing the repression, actually offering a sort of imprisonment.  And why speak? was a question that seemed so significant, though it fades through thinking, especially with set vocabularies, rhythms of speech, even stylings that permeate the way the written word presents itself. But loosening its meaning is of incomparable value: before we speak, we think. We think and...
Read more about it »