About this item

On ‘Tallahassee’, The Mountain Goats' 4AD debut originally released in 2003, John Darnielle strips his music of the tape hiss that surrounded his previous work like a security blanket made of static, opting for a clean sound that emphasizes the album's sometimes stinging, sometimes sublimely beautiful words and melodies.

Though the lo-fi soulfulness that gave his songs an extra, homemade charm before is missed, it wouldn't have fit the ambitious tale he sets out to tell here: the album revolves around a troubled husband and wife who move to Tallahassee to run away from themselves and, ultimately, drink themselves to death. Darnielle has written about this couple before, but ‘Tallahassee’ takes their relationship -- and his songwriting -- to a new level of vulnerability and intensity.

Even among albums chronicling difficult and dying relationships, such as ‘Blood On The Tracks’, ‘Shoot Out The Lights’, and, more recently, ‘Sea Change’, ‘Tallahassee’ takes a unique approach. Far from being morose or wallowing in sorrow, the album celebrates both the peaks and the valleys of a turbulent relationship; it's less like an autopsy of a love affair than an affectionate, occasionally drunken and rowdy, wake for it.

Ultimately, ‘Tallahassee’ is about the staying power, for better or worse, of this couple's love; likewise, the album itself has plenty of staying power, only getting better and growing richer with each listen.