Mountain Goats Koko, London 25/5/11
4/5
By: Matt Tomiak
'This one's about a young man with an insatiable appetite for amphetamines and tequila.' Bookish, bespectacled Mountain Goats lynchpin John Darnielle is introducing a new track entitled 'Birth of Serpents.' 'Ah, you whoop now, but come back to me in a few years...'
Darnielle has been recording brainy, rickety indie-folk under the Mountain Goats guise for almost two decades, chronicling small-town losers and high school misfits in sometimes unsettling, occasionally celebratory fashion. This year's 'All Eternals Deck' album, named after a set of imaginary fortune-telling cards, tilts the North Carolina-based trio into the realms of the fantastical, with tracks referencing Liza Minnelli, Charles Bronson and even vampire attacks.
There's still room for old favourites, though. 'Fifty years hence, when I'm a lounge singer, I'll have a very long into to this' Darnielle announces before 2002's knowingly OTT salute to astringent post-divorce hysteria, 'No Children'.
But perhaps the finest moments in the band's sizeable back catalogue are also the least tongue-in-cheek. 'Woke Up New', performed solo tonight, echoes Billy Bragg's classic 1986 single 'Levi Stubbs' Tears', another tale of heartbreak and solitude set against the humdrum minutiae of day-to-day life.
Artists in this article: Mountain Goats
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