The Mountain Goats are a folk band masterminded by singer-songwriter, John Darnielle. Personally, I'm not that well acquainted with the band's back catalogue, but I have been keeping up with their last couple of records. From what I've heard, The Mountain Goats always come through with simple chords, lightly backed by horns or maybe a piano, but it is all kept very stripped back and simple.
John Darnielle seems to hold to this kind of folk ethos, where you keep the instruments in the back and let the lyrics and stories do all the work, and for the most part on this album that works really really well. It also doesn't hurt that this record has a strong narrative and a lot of standout stories. If you couldn't tell from the cover, this is an entire album about the sport of pro wrestling. This world has always been the but of jokes in both song and in everyday life, but John has such a deep appreciation of the world of pro wrestling and uses every song on Beat The Champ to paint a picture of various people and situations in this world.
Songs like "Foreign Object", "Wolf Gimmick", and "Choked Out" all describe the violence involved, and have the most upbeat and energetic instrumentals to reflect that. While tracks like the opener and "Animal Mask" tell stories about coming up in small towns and the journey of becoming a pro wrestler. We also get a short glimpse of Darnielle's own love of pro wrestling on the track "The Legend of Chavo Guerrero" where he claims that he even hated Chavo's enemies.
I'd say that pretty much every track on this album is a winner as far as lyrics go, some songs make me laugh, like the unhinged character portrayed on "Wolf Gimmick" and others are quite sad like "Heel Turn 2". Unfortunately, I can't say the same for the instrumentation on this album. It's not that any of these tracks sound terrible, just that really none of them are anything you haven't heard before if you've listened to a Mountain Goats album. The chords, as I said before, are simple and to the point, and while I did appreciate some of the added instrumentation, overall, it didn't necessarily make the album any better than it would have been if it was just John with his acoustic guitar.
Still, this is a really good album, and I found myself enjoying it a lot. Even if you have zero interest in the subject matter here, I still think that the stories in and of themselves are enough to justify giving this album a try.
7.5/10
No comments:
Post a Comment