SPILL ALBUM REVIEW: THE MOUNTAIN GOATS – DAYS

THE MOUNTAIN GOATS
DAYS
CADMEAN DAWN RECORDS

Reviewing a Mountain Goats album can be a bit of a tall order. It’s like trying to describe the taste of an apple to an apple virgin. There are so many variables and textures and tastes that description would be ultimately lost. John Darnielle has released so much music under the Mountain Goats moniker with so many phases, shifts, and styles that one cannot just compare apples to apples and so you’re forced to just lean into the experience of it. Darnielle himself would simply claim that there is “at least one” Mountain Goats record and maybe that’s an apt way to say it because nearly every album is a stand alone. It’s an experience, ripe with metaphors and imagery that sometimes poke at strange places in the psyche.

Days is the 24th official album in a career spanning more than 35 years. What was originally titled Grunges, a sequel to 2017’s Goths, Days forgoes the coffins, spiders, and black nail polish and travels down the road of self reflection, looking back through the past few decades with an increasing awareness of mortality. Indeed, Days is at times a pretty death heavy album, but that doesn’t equal dark or moody. It’s just real. And such is Darnielle’s way. He manages to paint little pictures of obscure things and buffoonish people in odd situations in a way that’s endearing, sometimes borrowing from real life and sometimes fictional.

“Charlie Sheen Reaches Out To the Feds” is a great example of possibly blurred fictional buffoonery. Legend has it that one evening in the ‘80s a presumably very ‘partied up’ Charlie Sheen was watching a pretty sketchy Japanese shock horror movie and was so convinced that he’d stumbled upon an actual snuff film that he called the FBI to report it. It is a ridiculous tale and Darnielle manages to make it into an absolute anthem.

And then there’s “Shallow Grave.” This is quite possibly one of the happiest sounding songs about dying I’ve ever heard. The lyrics speak for themselves and if Darnielle himself describes this one as a “bop” and summer song of the year, well, need I say more? Who knew dying could be so fun?!

“Woodstock” is an actually quite lovely take on the shit show that was the ill fated 1999 sequel to a 3-day festival of peace and music, turned into a scene of rain, riots, and a young man with a microphone hollering “cocaine!”

And so it goes, snapshots of life, simple words, poetry about bands, concerts, eras, and getting older. Days is an album about living and dying and hopeful needful things. It’s very much a Mountain Goats album. Is it their best? Probably not, but it has a lot of their best qualities and some really great songs that fans will love.

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