Tallahassee

 (22 customer reviews)

This CD is simply beautiful. Not since Lisa Germano's Excerpts from a Love Circus has an album been so perfect in it's entirety. The songwriting is a wonderland of dark and beautiful poetry backed by music that ranges from simple elegance to out and out rockers. This is a polished piece of art and I think the music benefits greatly from the somewhat fuller production without losing it's low-fi appeal. My favorite Mountain Goats CD so far even though I have barely scratched the surface of MGs material that is available. This is a great place to start exploring the Mountain Goats musical landscape..

I've been a Mountain Goats fan for a few years now and have grown to love the buzzy drone of John Darnielle's tape recorder at the beginning and end of each song. His previous recordings sound as if they are recorded in a bedroom on equipment he found abandoned in an alley, but combined with John's honest and wry vocals the rawness really works. Alas, this album was obviously recorded in a studio by people who knew what they were doing. This sound isn't what I would describe as lush, but most tracks have several instruments and the music has a fuller, more polished sound. As an earlier reviewer noted, this requires some mental gear shifting if you are a fan of this bands earlier albums. That said, after a few listens, this album really grew on me. The song "See America Right" has moved up the top of my rather competitive list of favorite Mountain Goats songs. It has all of the best aspects of his song writing--a character who has lost control, a road trip, quirky...Read more

Since 1992, John Darnielle has been creating lo-fi plot-centered music as the Mountain Goats.

Darnielle's style has always been to tell stories through song. We're not talking anything like a musical here, nothing quite so coherent as Rent. He tells his stories as a booze-hound trying to recall what he did last night, through a series of clipped, vague, and often unclear flashbacks. Most often, Darnielle lays out his stories through a series of first person stream-of-thought narrations by one or more of the albums characters. This being said, the word `narration' does not fully convey what Darnielle accomplishes through this. The result he has achieved time and time again is an experience akin to watching a person's life through their own eyes during periodic installations of their existence. Frequent listeners may expose themselves to the risk of becoming attached to the characters, who are, perhaps without exception, tragic figures in some fashion. If you want an album...Read more