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September 22, 2005

Stick your tongue out, catch the pieces as they drift down the air

You know that possessive feeling you get over those things that are closest to your heart?

If you're a Sad Indie Kid like me, you've been through the cycle with countless artists. You discover a half mention in some crinkly zine or equally virtually rough around the edges website, perhaps a track spun on radio with the most brief of back-announces, and you're gone. You're downloading then mail ordering everything that they've ever recorded. You've met your songs, and it's time for friendship. They are yours. The b-sides. The tapes. The fan sites that obsess over lyrical nuance.

And then you walk past a radio playing a station you'd never listen to, corporate rock whores, all of that, (so says the back of your t-shirt), and you hear a chorus. And something inside of you breaks. They've. Oh god. They've crossed over.

They're not mine any more. They've met somebody new.

The Mountain Goats are the epitome of that special kind of band, once the most obscure of home tapers, releasing cassettes on a label called Shrimper, sparsely acoustic songs known as much for their tape hiss as their striking poetics. And then years on, a major(ish) label in 4AD, and lush John Vanderslice production, and full bands, and big singalong hits, and I'm reading about them in the New York Times. Here in Australia, suddenly there's Triple J high rotation, and singles, and digital downloads. They've crossed over.

Okay, so when I say epitome, it's not like John Darnielle is this decade's Michael Stipe, but I'm talking relative. Say, a scale of Okkervil River to Death Cab or something. Wait, let's obscure that up a bit better on the left side. Jandek? Nah, he's got a documentary and everything, and plays gigs these days. Neutral Milk Hotel? Pffft, I've heard In the Aeroplane Over the Sea in the cafe next to my office. In these networked times, obscure becomes so much more tricky -- as soon as it hits Pitchfork, the OC set are never far behind. It's tough, being an elitist obscurist. The band I want on the left hand side are so obscure that you don't yet get to know about them. In fact, they've never even released a record.

(Ahem) To rerail the train...

When The Mountain Goats visited Perth two years ago, they (he) played to a respectfully sized crowd of the usual folks you'd expect to show up at any touring indie gig in Perth, which really meant about 10 people might have owned an album and everybody else was just along for the ride. Darnielle, bizarrely playing support at a bad (defunct) Perth band's album launch, sold CDs at the edge of the stage at the end, and thanked me profusely for giving him the right change. It was one of my favourite gigs ever. I hear the Bunbury gig had about 6 people present, all of whom were my friends that drove down there.

And then last Friday night, in a packed Rosemount, at the end of an entirely sold out Australian tour, a musician closer to my soul than most any other was playing to a crowd of singalong chart followers, talking over the old stuff and going crazy over the big singles.

And you know what? I didn't mind a bit.

If anybody deserves mainstream success, however unlikely, it's John Darnielle. His lyrics may have gotten me through breakups and bouts of depression, may still now get me through the harder days (the ones that haven't gotten quite desperate enough to break out the Neutral Milk or Molina), and may have given me more moments of lyrical appreciation than even Morrissey (who he, of course, does not like one bit!), but god damn it it was just fucking great to hear hundreds of people shouting along to the chronicle of self-destruction in the face of the horrors of family that is "This Year".

In Sasha Frere Jones' excellent recent article in the New Yorker, he draws threads between The Mountain Goats and another band I'm currently going crazy over for different reasons, The Hold Steady. Jones argues that the important thing both Darnielle and The Hold Steady's Craig Gill bring to music is something sadly missing from the last decade or so in the alterna-mainstream. Something simple: clarity --

Both are rock musicians who behave like hip-hop m.c.s, writing lyrics in complete sentences and delivering their songs emphatically, as though the point of making music is to communicate.

In Perth, JD seemed genuinely thrilled to be playing to such a ridiculously appreciative audience, and I'm happy. He's not crossed over -- he's been heard. The obscurist in me honestly does not mind. It would have had I neglected to buy a ticket before the night, but thankfully I had forewarnings of sellouts from the East. The show was every bit as brilliant as that last gig, even if there were few songs from the older albums. He seemed at times as though he felt some kind of need to satisfy the new audience and was almost apologetic for playing some older, quieter numbers (this crowd didn't even do the singalongs to songs from Tallahassee, and that was just two albums ago). But he ended, thankfully and brilliantly, with "The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton", and all was perfect. Hail Satan.

Technorati Tags: music

Posted by patrick at September 22, 2005 8:48 PM

Comments

Posted by: marty at September 23, 2005 10:39 AM

Posted by: marty at September 23, 2005 11:15 AM

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