{"id":854129,"date":"2026-08-11T11:58:17","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T11:58:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/854129\/"},"modified":"2026-08-11T11:58:17","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T11:58:17","slug":"the-mountain-goats-days-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/854129\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mountain Goats: Days Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some of the most beloved Mountain Goats<\/a> songs are the desperate, defiant ones, where everything is in the process of collapse. The lo-fi sound of John Darnielle\u2019s earliest records embodied the same emotional overspill as the lyrics, but starting with 2003\u2019s Tallahassee<\/a>, Darnielle explored more ornate production in service of the same raw feelings. By the time of 2017\u2019s Goths<\/a>, the band\u2019s sound had become adventurous enough to ditch the acoustic guitar entirely, dropping rough-around-the-edges characters into smooth, accomplished arrangements ostensibly at odds with\u2014but obliquely perfect for\u2014their sensibilities.<\/p>\n

Darnielle started writing the latest Mountain Goats record, Days, as an attempt to do for 1990s grunge culture what Goths did for the Docs and eyeliner crowds of the \u201980s\u2014a redistributive history, bestowing attention on the unfairly forgotten. There\u2019s still a bit of that on the final product, but the writing expanded beyond any particular scene or era. Where Goths has its jaunty song about being \u201cPaid in Cocaine,\u201d Days has \u201cWoodstock,\u201d a lush song in which we watch a young man \u201cyell about cocaine\/shirtless before God.\u201d Like that \u201990s Woodstock revival, Days is more of an extension than a sequel; it drops plenty of small names, yes, but it\u2019s also drolly sympathetic to the cruelties of commercial success. There\u2019s also a consistent eye to what a camera can and can\u2019t capture\u2014half of the songs mention some sort of footage, and the rest are explicit epitaphs.<\/p>\n

No score yet, be the first to add.<\/p>\n

In addition to being heartbreaking and profound, Darnielle\u2019s lyrics have always been very funny, and Days extends this sensibility to the music. \u201cSong for Layne Staley\u201d starts by evoking the sound of Darnielle\u2019s earliest albums\u2014crackled acoustic guitar, lyrics delivered in staccato bursts\u2014but then undercuts itself with tremolo, then Jon Wurster\u2019s drums and Rob Jost\u2019s bass, and, suddenly, he\u2019s singing about the late Alice in Chains<\/a> frontman, on TV in \u201cdesigner shades.\u201d It\u2019s a short song, but there\u2019s a whole life inside, traced from youthful boredom to mainstream success and down into doom. It lands its kicker with the help of deft instrumentation and an anthemic build\u2014somehow, you beat the odds and make it to the top, only to discover, \u201cnationwide, live on the air,\u201d that you don\u2019t want what you fought so hard to get.<\/p>\n

Goths brought out the subculture\u2019s sensitive side with a sunny, straight-faced musical costume but there are moments on Days when the ceremonial dress seems more befitting of a seance, like the way \u201cCandlebox\u201d resurrects the soaring arcs of radio-rock power balladry in order to sob beneath them. Not everything clicks: Some refrains get repeated one-too-many times, sometimes the arrangements linger in the unsatisfying middle between sharp understatement and playful experiment. \u201cLast Day\u201d has some wacky touches, but the lyrics lack the detail Darnielle is so good at, and though it works on a conceptual level\u2014a closing song about revelations that never quite arrive\u2014it fails to achieve either the climactic payoff or graceful relief found in his discography\u2019s more distinctive farewells.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Some of the most beloved Mountain Goats songs are the desperate, defiant ones, where everything is in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":854130,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[342,49,48,75,341,343],"class_list":["post-854129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-albums","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/854129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=854129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/854129\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/854130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=854129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=854129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=854129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}