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ok i am going to make a short list of what i consider to be More Accessible mountain goats songs for ppl who don’t rly know where to start

queernuck:

nonbinarytouya:

sindolyn-harlot:

  • This Year – a rly rly catchy and upbeat song about Continuing On Living even when you want to die and also being a teenager living through familial abuse
  • Cry for Judas – another upbeat song abt a sad subject, this time about not rly fitting in anywhere and feeling broken and unlovable and hopeless and being unable to escape from any of it
  • Werewolf Gimmick – a really intense and fast song mostly about wrestling and Going Wild in ways that you almost definitely should not do
  • Sax Rohmer #1 – i honestly couldn’t tell you what this song is “about” it’s a very… Big song that is pretty large in scope and covers a lot of mood. “i am coming home to you with my own blood in my mouth” is a good way to describe it
  • Heretic Pride – one of my favourite, favourite songs ever from any TMG album. it deals with a lot of things – persecution, revelation, pleasure in death and pain, righteous fury and transformation. another upbeat song about death, definitely, which i can Definitely Relate To
  • Damn These Vampires – i’ll just copy jd’s own words here: 

    ‘You have friends and you think that they’re the greatest people in the world, but there comes a time when you realise, all at once or it can come upon you gradually, that your friends aren’t the greatest people in the world but they’re actually parasites sucking the blood from you – not because they need the blood but just for their own entertainment. And then you have like one friend on your shoulder saying you’re just being neurotic, your friends are great, and yourself in the middle saying ‘no they’re not, look at the facts!’’

  • Autoclave – definitely one of the more interesting ones musically, the vocal delivery is really nice and calming imo. a song about kind of hating yourself and feeling unlovable and unable to open up and being scared of exposing yourself to other people – or rather, exposing other people to you.

here are some more imo:

No Children – this along with This Year is like, The Quintessential Mountain Goats Song, it’s about being in, to quote Darnielle, a relationship that is “not just gonna suck–it’s gonna suck ass. You’re going to make up a little chart of all the asses that it sucks. There will be an ass chart on your bedroom wall”, and more generally about the cycle of awful cruelty and endless retaliation that comes with a truly toxic relationship which is maybe not the most relatable thing of all time for some people but for everyone else there’s still the great hook and a streak of vicious black humour to enjoy.
Never Quite Free – the title really says it all with this one; it’s a song about the way that the shit you make it through lives with you, in its own small and big ways, forever, and the sometimes unbearable twin sensations of freedom and limitless possibility with nagging, unshakeable fear and doubt and turmoil that comes from being forged in the fire of deep and lasting personal trauma – probably one of the most common recurring themes in the Goats’ music, and rarely expressed as clearly as here.
Love Love Love – a very very very low-key song in its instrumentation (i’ll admit when i first heard it i thought it was pretty dull tbh), but a wonderful case study in Darnielle’s style of lyricism, weaving classic art and popular culture and poetry together to craft a subdued thoughtful “love song” that obliquely illustrates without ever outright stating the ways that love can push people to make the worst decisions of their lives. a song that’s really worth sitting with for a while and mulling over. (#suicide warning on this one though)
Up the Wolves – a more up-tempo, driving song, a paean to the kind of petty, angry, outlandish revenge fantasies that you learn to cultivate because sometimes they are the only thing keeping you alive and moving forwards, and a testament to anger as the positive, energising force it can be at its best

If I may be so bold, I’d like to add a few more of my favorites, ones that are also all relatively easy to get into (even if they dip into the more lo-fi era of the band)

  • The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton – An absolute classic, one that you can sing along to with your friends and family who aren’t against chanting “Hail Satan!” It’s a song about youth, about your friends, in no small part about mental illness. John himself said it best: "People think this song is a joke, but there’s nothing funny about being in a goddamn hospital bed when you’re twelve, and trying to explain to people that the music you wanna listen to isn’t going to turn you into a serial killer or anything, it just makes you feel better. But then you get a little older, and it does get funny.“
  • Cotton – This is a song about letting go, holding on, remembering, forgetting, it’s a song for a lot of people and a lot of things all at once. “This song is for the people who tell their families that they’re sorry for things that they can’t and won’t feel sorry for” is one of my favorite Mountain Goats lyrics of all time, it brings a tear to my eye and I know there’s many a trans girl like me out there who feels exactly the same.
  • Michael Myers Resplendent – Based in part off of the Halloween series of movies, it’s a song about admitting defeat in a way that’s at once failing and noble. It’s about a horror movie, about house fires, about winners and losers. It’s the last song on Heretic Pride and the closer to a thoroughly modern, but also thoroughly Mountain Goats, album.
  • Two Headed Boy – A long-lost forum post said that “You can’t graduate being 16 without listening to In The Aeroplane Over The Sea” and I maintain that the only song that comes close for raw pathos for a kid on the cusp of 17 feeling like the world is going to collapse is “This Year” so hearing John cover this song is a perfect kind of song to listen to when you’re 22, and you’re not better by any means, and in fact you’re considerably worse in some, but you have a future and you know you want that future. It does a great job of showing how John’s music gains so much from his frenetic guitar work, his straining and earnest voice, his pure goddamned passion. It’s also just a good cover.

Also, I’d love to direct @chartreusse to this post should she decide to listen to songs instead of going the laborious route of slogging through the entire discography chronologically as I did when getting into The Mountain Goats. They’re a band with much to say and much to explore.

cryoverkiltmilk:

violent-darts:

grison-in-labs:

fractiousrvt:

tinyelfperson:

melissa-anne-rose:

beebossinner:

babyanimalgifs:

this husky is mad because he wants to take a bath but isn’t allowed to

let my poor baby take his bath

If y’all really knew. If y’all really knew what utter drama queens huskies are this wouldn’t surprise you at all.

This is my life.

Literally my husky is the same way. He’s only a few months and he’ll cry to go back outside after being in the house two seconds.

I once ran out of my house in my pajamas at 2 in the fucking morning because I heard a dog screaming like it had been hit by a car. As I’m pelting towards the road barefoot I see an open garage with two people standing there and a husky in the back of a truck. I slowed down and asked them if that noise had been their dog.

Heavily embarrassed they admitted that it was. The reason for the godawful tortured sound the dog had made?

“We took his running harness off.”

And that was the moment I vowed to never own a husky.

I frequently pet sit for a friend’s husky, who is completely normal and unremarkable for her kind with one crucial exception.

She is dumb as soup.

(You didn’t hear that from me: her owner thinks she’s a genius, bless him.)

Anyway, my dog Tribble thinks Arya the husky is one of her very own adopted babies, so she stays with us fairly often. Reasons I have heard this dog dissolve into a screaming, wailing meltdown include:

  • I followed my buddy up a mildly steep hill and now she’s gone and I can’t figure out how to get down
  • That one cat won’t be friends with me even though all the others will
  • I hopped up on the sofa and the hardwood floor next to it is much more confusing than the laminate I have lived on since I was two months old and I don’t know how to get down
  • I’m mildly bored and my buddy yelled at me when I tried to bite her neck for the zillionth time
  • I want to play with that potted plant but you said I couldn’t
  • I’m overcome with joy because you took me on a walk to the hardware store
  • I want that biscuit but I forgot what sit means and now I’m frustrated
  • I haven’t seen you in two weeks and I forgot you weren’t dead and I’m overjoyed
  • You are not petting me enough
  • You are not petting me at all
  • I got lost four times in five minutes on the off leash trail and now you won’t let me off again for a while
  • There’s a brush and I need it
  • You made eye contact with me and didn’t immediately drop everything to pet me

She’s a very good dog, and she’s a sweet dog who is never offended by anything, but the screaming has singlehandedly ensued I will never, ever, ever own a husky. I like having functioning ears too much.

To be fair, you and your friend may both be right: huskies, like border-collies, are just intelligent enough to develop Exciting Cognitive Neuroses, much like a toddler, which frankly dumber dogs will skip because they don’t actually have quite enough extra cognitive space to think up ways to be utterly fucking ridiculous. 

I kind of suspect this is going on here in part because of the dog being so very specifically upset that the one cat won’t be friends, despite all the other cats being friends, and also the overcome-with-joy bits: you’ll notice they’re very similar to what makes toddlers randomly cry for no reason. 

Where a bulldog doesn’t care about the difference between laminate and hardwood, a husky is just smart enough to get VERY CONCERNED ABOUT HOW THESE ARE SUBTLY DIFFERENT AND POSSIBLY IT MEANS THAT GETTING DOWN WILL BE A TOTALLY DIFFERENT EXPERIENCE AAAAAUGH! and get hysterically anxious about it. 

“Smarter”, in animals as in humans, does not actually always mean “more sensible.” XD 

I was feeling very lonely this evening and now I’m laughing down to my belly so thank you for this post

rosalarian:

dancinbutterfly:

victorian-sexstache:

secretgaygentdanvers:

secretgaygentdanvers:

secretgaygentdanvers:

secretgaygentdanvers:

hi everyone im still pissed we never learnt in school that shakespeare was bi and wrote the sonnets about a dude and a woc he was into

hi everyone im still pissed that we were told emily dickinson was a spinster when she spent her whole life writing love letters to a woman

hi everyone im still pissed about the fact that we never got taught any of the super super gay Greek myths. it seems impossible to think they managed to pick all the hetero myths when Greece was just THAT gay but guess what? they did.

hi everyone virginia woolf was also bi im still pissed that so much of literature is queer and has queer coding within it that deserves to be analysed through that lens in the same way that we don’t ignore the gender of an author, but sexuality is never mentioned in highschool literature classes

hi everyone i’m still pissed that we were never taught that da vinci was gay af and that the ideal the western world has of jesus (white, long straight brown hair) was based on one of his male lovers

hi everyone i’m still pissed that we were told sir isaac newton died a virgin when he had multiple boyfriends over the course of his life one of whom he wrote passionate love letters too and lived with

There are people out there trying to straightwashing fucking Sappho. Sappho os Lesbos, patron saint of all queer girls. Sorry I didn’t follow the format y’all had going. I’m just mad as hell about how they’re trying to do Sappho so dirty.