Re: mountain goats
willis
location: jemez mountains
listening to: quickened heartbeats
registered: 2002.11.17
posts: 251
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what? what did i miss about the mountain goats? well, i have yet to hear the new album, The Sunset Tree. the college radio director told me i could review it for the station, because he knows nobody knows john darnielle like me... but he flaked on me.this new one is, i think, the third album on a slightly major label, 4AD. Tallahassee and We Shall All Be Healed came first.the 4AD ones are a bit slicker and more produced. some longtime fans are unhappy with them.mind you, there are a lot of albums that were released only overseas, only on vinyl, only on cassette, or not officially released at all...of the more widely available ones, not including this new one, i'd recommend these 5 in this order, though i like 'em all a lot.Full Force Galesburg (1997 , emperor jones)
All Hail West Texas (2001 , emperor jones)
Tallahassee (2002 , 4AD)
The Coroner's Gambit (2000?, absolutely kosher)
Sweden (1996?, shrimper)
some really great liner notes, rarely clarifying anything...Ask the typical American what he or she knows about Sweden and you'll probably be met with a confused, empty sort of look, a shrug of the shoulders, and a stammering response about Swedish meatballs; ask the typical music fan and you'll probably hear something about ABBA and Ace of Base; ask me and I'll start telling you bout the Swedish chef on The Muppet Show, who never seemed to get around to making the meatballs but sang better than all the members of ABBA and Ace of Base put together.While our inability to attach any definitive imagery to our conceptions of Sweden may have something to do with garden-variety American cultural know-nothingism, it probably owes just as much to the Swedes' oft-overlooked skill at cleverly obscuring their true nature. Everything about the Scandanavian country, from its understatedly simple flag design to its studious neutrality in both World Wars, has been carefully crafted to lull us into accepting the Swedes as a nation of cheery blue-eyed blondes with nothing better to do than sip aquavit and eat smorgasbord. Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact of the matter is that Swedes are brilliantly cunning and ruthlessly ambitious. Not all of them are as obfuscatorily fiendish as IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad, who grudgingly admitted in November of 1994 that he had "naively" belonged to a Nazi organization between 1945 and 1948 (and whose stores, to my knowledge, have never played ABBA or Ace of Base over their sound systems, although they do serve Swedish meatballs), but as a rule it is wise to treat Swedish claims and statements with a certain healthy skepticism. Official statistics on alcohol consumption, for example, rank Sweden among the lightest-drinking countries in the world, but this is characteristically deceptive -- high alcohol taxes make drinking in Sweden prohibitively expensive, so most Swedes simply hop over the border to either Finland or Norway and get soused to their hearts' considerable content. Similarly, the 1986 assssination of outwardly docile Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme was originally seen as an act of senseless terrorism but is now widely acknowledged to have been an ingenious and necessary sacrifice, carried out with Palme's full cooperation and approval, in order to draw attention to the high quality of Sweden's long-underrated firearms industry. Even the Swedish chef himself, long a staple on The Muppet Show, was not fully what he seemed: close inspection reveals that he was the only Muppet to have human hands rather than Muppet hands, an anomaly whose secret apparently went to the grave with honorary Swede Jim Henson in 1990. Such inscrutability, coupled with a national history dotted with character-building ordeals like the Stockholm Bloodbath of 1520, the Thirty Years War of 1618-48, and the Linköping Cannibalism Outbreak of 1926, adds up to a juggernaut in the making. Americans would be wise to protect their collective flank and pay heed to the warning recently issued by the Swedish rock band Whale, whose 1994 "Hobo Humpin' Slobo Babe" single contained the following backwards-masked message: "We will bury you...bury you."
willis
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what? what did i miss about the mountain goats? well, i have yet to hear the new album, The Sunset Tree. the college radio director told me i could review it for the station, because he knows nobody knows john darnielle like me... but he flaked on me.this new one is, i think, the third album on a slightly major label, 4AD. Tallahassee and We Shall All Be Healed came first.the 4AD ones are a bit slicker and more produced. some longtime fans are unhappy with them.mind you, there are a lot of albums that were released only overseas, only on vinyl, only on cassette, or not officially released at all...of the more widely available ones, not including this new one, i'd recommend these 5 in this order, though i like 'em all a lot.Full Force Galesburg (1997 , emperor jones)
All Hail West Texas (2001 , emperor jones)
Tallahassee (2002 , 4AD)
The Coroner's Gambit (2000?, absolutely kosher)
Sweden (1996?, shrimper)
some really great liner notes, rarely clarifying anything...Ask the typical American what he or she knows about Sweden and you'll probably be met with a confused, empty sort of look, a shrug of the shoulders, and a stammering response about Swedish meatballs; ask the typical music fan and you'll probably hear something about ABBA and Ace of Base; ask me and I'll start telling you bout the Swedish chef on The Muppet Show, who never seemed to get around to making the meatballs but sang better than all the members of ABBA and Ace of Base put together.While our inability to attach any definitive imagery to our conceptions of Sweden may have something to do with garden-variety American cultural know-nothingism, it probably owes just as much to the Swedes' oft-overlooked skill at cleverly obscuring their true nature. Everything about the Scandanavian country, from its understatedly simple flag design to its studious neutrality in both World Wars, has been carefully crafted to lull us into accepting the Swedes as a nation of cheery blue-eyed blondes with nothing better to do than sip aquavit and eat smorgasbord. Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact of the matter is that Swedes are brilliantly cunning and ruthlessly ambitious. Not all of them are as obfuscatorily fiendish as IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad, who grudgingly admitted in November of 1994 that he had "naively" belonged to a Nazi organization between 1945 and 1948 (and whose stores, to my knowledge, have never played ABBA or Ace of Base over their sound systems, although they do serve Swedish meatballs), but as a rule it is wise to treat Swedish claims and statements with a certain healthy skepticism. Official statistics on alcohol consumption, for example, rank Sweden among the lightest-drinking countries in the world, but this is characteristically deceptive -- high alcohol taxes make drinking in Sweden prohibitively expensive, so most Swedes simply hop over the border to either Finland or Norway and get soused to their hearts' considerable content. Similarly, the 1986 assssination of outwardly docile Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme was originally seen as an act of senseless terrorism but is now widely acknowledged to have been an ingenious and necessary sacrifice, carried out with Palme's full cooperation and approval, in order to draw attention to the high quality of Sweden's long-underrated firearms industry. Even the Swedish chef himself, long a staple on The Muppet Show, was not fully what he seemed: close inspection reveals that he was the only Muppet to have human hands rather than Muppet hands, an anomaly whose secret apparently went to the grave with honorary Swede Jim Henson in 1990. Such inscrutability, coupled with a national history dotted with character-building ordeals like the Stockholm Bloodbath of 1520, the Thirty Years War of 1618-48, and the Linköping Cannibalism Outbreak of 1926, adds up to a juggernaut in the making. Americans would be wise to protect their collective flank and pay heed to the warning recently issued by the Swedish rock band Whale, whose 1994 "Hobo Humpin' Slobo Babe" single contained the following backwards-masked message: "We will bury you...bury you."
