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.