Never get away
Greetings from Bayard's computer in Philadelphia! Marisa and I just saw the Mountain Goats again, this time with Bayard and Alex. This show represented many firsts. It was my first time seeing the Mountain Goats twice on a single tour (the last night, in fact, of the tour we caught towards the beginning in NYC a few weeks ago). It was my first time seeing the Mountain Goats outside of New York City at all, and my first time seeing any rock and roll bands in Philadelphia. It was also the first time since, wow, 2008, that I saw the Mountain Goats without Maggie and Cristin? (Tear! But Bayard and Alex were seeing their first MG show, hooray!)
So we saw them at the Theater of Living Arts in downtown (?) Philly and it might be the biggest room I've seen them play apart from when we saw them in that church thing. The TLA is cool, with Muppet Show-red curtains everywhere, but also loud. Another milestone reached: possibly loudest Mountain Goats show ever? The sound mix was actually really good, nice and clear. Just loud. Not quite Music Hall of Williamsburg Since 2010 loud, but louder than the Bowery show last month.
This was also a shorter show: fewer songs (not drastically, just minus three or four), and fewer long stories in between the songs (still funny stuff, just not quite as loquacious). Online research suggests this was not unusual for the second leg of the tour, but I don't think it betrays any diminished enthusiasm on Darnielle's part, because he was still hollering and stomping and jumping around and generally giving it his all. I do wonder if the maybe-take-a-request-or-two portion of the show (and the accompanying screams for all manners of songs) has ever-so-slightly discouraged him from those tangents where he might throw in an extra rarity, or maybe he just wants to have a tighter mostly-full-band set, because the set turnover was actually a little less than I would've expected. But we still got a solid five songs that we didn't get last time, and they went all out for the end and encores, hitting pretty much all of the standard crowd-pleasers short of "Going to Georgia," which seems like more of an occasioanl thing. I guess he played "Golden Boy" a few days ago but f those "Golden Boy" people. (What good is being a semi-hardcore Mountain Goats fan if you can't have disdain for some arbitrary segment of said fandom?)
Anyway, it was pretty awesome, as usual, and it was nice to hear songs from All Eternals Deck now that I've heard the album a dozen times or so. Some of the quieter songs gain some intensity in the live versions -- you can especially tell how much Darnielle digs "Birth of Serpents." The slower and heavier version of "Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton" was ecstatic, and Darnielle surfed out into the crowd as the show closed.
Practiced twice a week in Jeff's bedroom, practiced hard:
Liza Forever Minnelli
Southwood Plantation Road
Jeff Davis County Blues
Dino Lupatti's Bones
Estate Sale Sign
Family Happiness
Outer Scorpion Squadron
Song for an Old Friend
Color in Your Cheeks
Woke Up New
The Age of Kings
Birth of Serpents
Minnesota
Damn These Vampires
Broom People
Palmcorder Yajna
---
No Children
Never Quite Free
This Year
---
The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton
Hail Satan! Goodnight!
So we saw them at the Theater of Living Arts in downtown (?) Philly and it might be the biggest room I've seen them play apart from when we saw them in that church thing. The TLA is cool, with Muppet Show-red curtains everywhere, but also loud. Another milestone reached: possibly loudest Mountain Goats show ever? The sound mix was actually really good, nice and clear. Just loud. Not quite Music Hall of Williamsburg Since 2010 loud, but louder than the Bowery show last month.
This was also a shorter show: fewer songs (not drastically, just minus three or four), and fewer long stories in between the songs (still funny stuff, just not quite as loquacious). Online research suggests this was not unusual for the second leg of the tour, but I don't think it betrays any diminished enthusiasm on Darnielle's part, because he was still hollering and stomping and jumping around and generally giving it his all. I do wonder if the maybe-take-a-request-or-two portion of the show (and the accompanying screams for all manners of songs) has ever-so-slightly discouraged him from those tangents where he might throw in an extra rarity, or maybe he just wants to have a tighter mostly-full-band set, because the set turnover was actually a little less than I would've expected. But we still got a solid five songs that we didn't get last time, and they went all out for the end and encores, hitting pretty much all of the standard crowd-pleasers short of "Going to Georgia," which seems like more of an occasioanl thing. I guess he played "Golden Boy" a few days ago but f those "Golden Boy" people. (What good is being a semi-hardcore Mountain Goats fan if you can't have disdain for some arbitrary segment of said fandom?)
Anyway, it was pretty awesome, as usual, and it was nice to hear songs from All Eternals Deck now that I've heard the album a dozen times or so. Some of the quieter songs gain some intensity in the live versions -- you can especially tell how much Darnielle digs "Birth of Serpents." The slower and heavier version of "Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton" was ecstatic, and Darnielle surfed out into the crowd as the show closed.
Practiced twice a week in Jeff's bedroom, practiced hard:
Liza Forever Minnelli
Southwood Plantation Road
Jeff Davis County Blues
Dino Lupatti's Bones
Estate Sale Sign
Family Happiness
Outer Scorpion Squadron
Song for an Old Friend
Color in Your Cheeks
Woke Up New
The Age of Kings
Birth of Serpents
Minnesota
Damn These Vampires
Broom People
Palmcorder Yajna
---
No Children
Never Quite Free
This Year
---
The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton
Hail Satan! Goodnight!