Originally released in October 2000, The Coroner’s Gambit finds John Darnielle between physical and sonic spaces, five of its sixteen songs recorded in Simon Joyner’s Omaha, Nebraska, studio, five more at home in Colo, Iowa, and the rest in Ames.

The album came together slowly; the Mountain Goats had released music every year from 1991 to 1998, but between the release of that year’s New Asian Cinema EP and The Coroner’s Gambit, 1999 passed without an official Mountain Goats release. The additional time that went into The Coroner’s Gambit paid off: it is a breakthrough for Darnielle as a songwriter and practitioner of the full-length album. His characters are sharply drawn, the immaculately appointed lore of the worlds they occupy providing them some shelter from the storm.

He has grown as a guitarist and in voice, wringing moments of sweetness and humour from songs of fury and lament, nimbly modulating from mourning to longing, passing air through the lungs of the dead and survivors alike.

The mix of home and studio recordings grants The Coroner’s Gambit a thrilling sense of immediacy while pointing towards a future that is soon to break open with All Hail West Texas and Tallahassee. The Coroner’s Gambit is a masterpiece in its own right, an introspective epic that further burnishes Darnielle’s reputation as one of our greatest songwriters, one whose gift for confessional fabulism knows few rivals.

In the ensuing years since its original release The Coroner’s Gambit has become somewhat tricky to pin down in its entirety. Releasing the CD for the segment of the Mountain Goats massive who just wanted the songs, and the LP for those drawn to the ephemera of the album as a package, vinyl copies were housed in a paper bag that had additional Darnielle-penned liner notes printed on them. One thousand vinyl copies were issued, and, based on reports from the collector’s scene, far fewer than one thousand bags survive to the present, its text living on largely through Flickr albums and fan sites. The 2024 reissue marks the passage of time with new text and liner notes by Darnielle for CD and LP.

TRACK LISTING

1. Jaipur
2. Elijah
3. Trick Mirror
4. Island Garden Song
5. The Coroner’s Gambit
6. Baboon
7. Scotch Grove
8. Horseradish Road
9. Family Happiness
10. Onions
11. “Bluejays And Cardinals”
12. Shadow Song
13. There Will Be No Divorce
14. Insurance Fraud #2
15. The Alphonse Mambo
16. We Were Patriots

Jenny from Thebes began its life as many albums by the Mountain Goats do, with John Darnielle playing the piano until a lyric emerged. That lyric, “Jenny was a warrior / Jenny was a thief / Jenny hit the corner clinic begging for relief,” became “Jenny III,” a song which laid down a challenge he’d never taken up before: writing a sequel to one of his most beloved albums.

The Mountain Goats’ catalog is thick with recurring characters Jenny, who originally appears in the All Hail West Texas track bearing her name, as well as in “Straight Six” from Jam Eater Blues and Transcendental Youth side two jam “Night Light,” is one of these, someone who enters a song unexpectedly, pricking up the ears of fans who are keen on continuing the various narrative threads running through the Mountain Goats’ discography before vanishing into the mist. In these songs, Jenny is largely defined by her absence, and she is given that definition by other characters. She is running from something. These features are beguiling, both to the characters who’ve told her story so far and to the listener. They invite certain questions: Who is Jenny, really? What is she running from? Well, she’s a warrior and a thief, and, this being an album by the Mountain Goats, it’s a safe bet whatever she’s fleeing is something bad. Something catastrophically bad.

Jenny from Thebes is the story of Jenny, her southwestern ranch style house, the people for whom that house is a place of safety, and the west Texas town that is uncomfortable with its existence. It is a story about the individual and society, about safety and shelter and those who choose to provide care when nobody else will.

Recorded at Tulsa, Oklahoma’s legendary The Church Studio with Grammy-winning producer/engineer Trina Shoemaker, Jenny from Thebes is a lush collection of showtunes, pushing Darnielle as a vocalist and the Mountain Goats as a band, broadening their sonic palette once again by leaning into influences like Godspell, Jim Steinman, and The Cars.

Lifted by Matt Douglas’ horn and string arrangements, the dreamy guitar of Bully leader (and Bleed Out producer) Alicia Bognanno, and backing vocals from Kathy Valentine of The Go-Go’s and Matt Nathanson, Jenny from Thebes is a widescreen musical in scope, a melodrama of richly detailed characters and sweeping emotions.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
1. Clean Slate
2. Ground Level
3. Only One Way
4. Fresh Tattoo
5. Cleaning Crew
6. Murder At The 18th St. Garage
SIDE B
7. From The Nebraska Plant
8. Same As Cash
9. Water Tower
10. Jenny III
11. Going To Dallas
12. Great Pirates

Heady with hooks and unforgettable melodies, gliding on deeply danceable grooves, always with Air Waves’ innate compassion, concision and uncanny pop sense shining throughout. A masterpiece that’s beautifully simple, instantly accessible and entirely addictive. Featuring Cass Mccombs, Skyler Skjelset (Fleet Foxes, Beach House), Luke Temple, Brian Betancourt (Hospitality, Sam Evian), Rina Mushonga, Frankie Cosmos, Lispector, David Christian, Ethan Sass, and Ben F

Maybe you are just like John Darnielle: In the depths of the pandemic end of 2020, the Mountain Goats frontman passed the time trapped at home watching pulpy action movies, finding comfort in familiar tropes and sofabound escapism. But you are not really like John Darnielle, unless the action movies you found comfort in included French thrillers like 2008’s Mesrine, vintage Italian poliziotteschi, or the 1974 Donald Pleasence mad-scientist vehicle The Freakmaker. Or unless watching them brought you back to your formative days as an artist, when watching films fueled and soundtracked your songwriting jags and bare-bones home recordings and in turn inspired your 20th album to be a song cycle about the allure and futility of vengeance. But there’s no shame in not being like John Darnielle; few people are.

“On earlier tapes you’ll find these sound samples,” Darnielle says. “‘Oh, where’s this sample from?’ It’s from whatever movie I was watching while I was sitting around on the couch with a guitar. I watch a movie, somebody’d say something that I like the sound of and I’ll write that phrase down. And then I would pause the VHS, write the song, record the song on a boombox, and go back to watching my movie. I got into doing that again; I just kept watching action movies and taking notes on what they’re about and on what the governing plots and tropes and styles are. It was very much like an immersion method acting technique.”

The resulting performance is Bleed Out, a cinematic experience unto itself. One song about preparing to exact bloody revenge begat another song about the act of exacting bloody revenge and then more songs about and the causes and the aftermath of being driven to exact bloody revenge, each delivered with the urgency and desperation deserving of their narrators and circumstances. “We often make a record and then bring in some guests who flesh out the textures,” Darnielle says. “And for this one, it was very much like a pack mentality. That sort of seemed to proceed from the songs.” One new face was that of Bully’s Alicia Bognanno, recommended to Darnielle by his manager as a producer who could help nurture the rougher edged sound these songs requested. “We met up and hit it off. She’s a great guitarist. It was kind of just a lark, to see what would happen, and it was totally great.”

Running narrative themes are not new to Mountain Goats projects, especially in recent years, be it the pro wrestlers of 2015’s Beat the Champ or the goths of 2017’s Goths. Darnielle was drawn to the antiheroes of the hard-boiled action flicks he was bingeing, particularly the ways in which their quests for justice were almost all inevitably doomed.

Bleed Out could be all one movie, from the opening training montage to the demise in the elegiac closing title track. Songs like “Make You Suffer,” “First Blood,” “Hostages,” and “Need More Bandages” do what they say on the tin, telling typically vivid, deliberately recognizable vignettes of desperate characters in no-win situations who plan on taking as many people down with them as they have to. But Darnielle sees these as unconnected stories that feel universal in their desire for justice, if not in their wanton bloodshed. Anthems don’t get more straightforward or anthem-y than “Wage Wars Get Rich Die Handsome,” tapping into an anger that’s easy to reach in 2022, even if the solutions aren’t.

Few people think as much, or as well, about violence and its portrayal as John Darnielle. His recent bestselling novel Devil House (his third) is all about the relationship between tragedy and entertainment, though he is careful to downplay any parallels to Bleed Out beyond a natural attraction to terrible things as a coping mechanism. “That’s what catharsis is,” he says. “When you are able to experience something that is frightening to you but you don’t have to be harmed by it that experience is really valuable. I think we’re reflecting on the nature of what we consume and of what it says about us.”

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
1. Training Montage
2. Mark On You
3. Wage Wars Get Rich Die Handsome
4. Extraction Point
SIDE B
5. Bones Don’t Rust
6. First Blood
7. Make You Suffer
8. Guys On Every Corner
SIDE C
9. Hostages
10. Need More Bandages
SIDE D
11. Incandescent Ruins
12. Bleed Out

When the Mountain Goats got together in March 2020, it was to make not one album, but two. The idea was to again work with Matt Ross-Spang, the dashing Memphis wunderkind. Matt pitched we spend a week at Sam Phillips Recording, his home base in Memphis, followed by another at the storied FAME Recording Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, a plan that dovetailed nicely with John’s notion of corralling these songs into two complementary batches: one light, one dark. The Memphis album Getting Into Knives, would be brighter, bolder, marked by rich and vibrant hues; the Muscle Shoals album Dark in Here, is quieter, smokier, but more deeply textured and intense. We were all aware of the mythos surrounding FAME. The second you step inside you transport to its early ’60s heyday and its louche mid-’70s denouement. The room we set up in is the room where Percy Sledge sang “When a Man Loves a Woman” and where Aretha Franklin recorded “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You).” The Wurlitzer with which Spooner Oldham opens the last? It’s sitting right there. Spooner is living musical history, having played with everyone from Bob Dylan and Neil Young to Linda Ronstadt and Liberace, for crying out loud. And Spooner is all over Dark in Here any time you hear

a bit of Hammond organ or electric piano chiming in without repeating a phrase. We tracked the album’s one outright banger, “The Destruction of the Kola Superdeep Borehole Tower,” live with Spooner, and “Mobile” and “Dark in Here” with guitarist Will McFarlane another local veteran who played with Bonnie Raitt for years. We only had Spooner for two afternoons, though, and Will for just one. After it was just the four of us: John playing acoustic guitar and occasional piano, the rhythm section of drummer Jon Wurster and myself, and our jack-of-all-trades Matt Douglas picking up everything else. The result is something more stripped down and intimate than the lush arrangements of Getting Into Knives.

Of “The Slow Parts on Death Metal Albums,” John concedes that the song is autobiographical. While the lines, “In a new universe / trying to find the mask that fits me” would take on a newly literal connotation in the weeks to come, the song is about going to late ‘80s metal shows at Fender’s Ballroom in Long Beach, and about seeking a sense of identity and community in strange and occasionally forbidding places. This theme feeling at once conspicuous and invisible, the frustrated craving for acceptance is echoed elsewhere. Then there are elegies to lost causes, some big and institutional (“The Destruction of the Kola Superdeep Borehole Tower”), some small and personal (“Arguing With the Ghost of Peter Laughner About His Coney Island Baby Review,” a tribute to David Berman, whose return from self-imposed musical exile had been cause for huge celebration in our camp). “Before I Got There” neglects to identify its victims, or the tragedy that’s befallen them.

John writes in the liner notes that “if you’re looking for a governing theme here, it’s calamity, as all the songs are either anticipating one or reflecting one that’s already happened.” Peter Hughes, Rochester, March 2021.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
1 Parisian Enclave
2 The Destruction Of The Kola
3 Superdeep Borehole Tower
4 Mobile
5 Dark In Here
6 Lizard Suit

SIDE B
7 When A Powerful Animal Comes
8 To The Headless Horseman
9 The New Hydra Collection
10 The Slow Parts On Death Metal Albums

SIDE C
10. Before I Got There
11. Arguing With The Ghost Of Peter Laughner About His Coney Island Baby Review
12. Let Me Bathe In Demonic Light

SIDE D
[Vinyl Etching]

A surprise cassette released April 2020, Songs for Pierre Chuvin is the Mountain Goats’ first all-boombox album since 2002’s All Hail West Texas. After selling over 4000 cassettes in a matter of minutes, the avid Mountain Goats fanbase has demanded more and we are happy to acquiesce! Songs for Pierre Chuvin will be available on CD and LP on March 26, 2021.

Praise for Songs for Pierre Chuvin:
“Recording on the same boombox that launched his career, John Darnielle returns to his lo-fi roots for an album of alienation, ancient pagans, and making it through the year together.” Pitchfork

“Full of images fit for these dismal times and slogans suited to surviving them, Pierre Chuvin is an inspiring reminder of how much each of us has left to learn.” NPR

“[Songs for Pierre Chuvin] can be used to escape the present emergency—or, if the listener so chooses, to better understand it.” The Atlantic

“Songs for Pierre Chuvin is exactly what we’ve come to expect: big-hearted songs full of warmth and smarts,

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A

1 Aulon Raid
2 Until Olympius Returns
3 Last Gasp At Calama
4 For The Snakes
5 The Wooded Hills Along The Black Sea
6 January 31, 438

SIDE B

7 Hopeful Assassins Of Zeno
8 Their Gods Do Not Have
9 Surgeons
10 Going To Lebanon 2
11 Exegetic Chains

On the first of March, 2020, John Darnielle, Peter Hughes, Matt Douglas, and Jon Wurster, aka the Mountain Goats band, visited legendary studio Sam Phillips Recording in Memphis, TN. Darnielle armed his band with new songs and reunited with producer Matt Ross-Spang who engineered last year’s In League with Dragons. In the same room where the Cramps tracked their 1980 debut album, the Mountain Goats spent a week capturing the magic of a band at the top of its game. The result is Getting Into Knives, the perfect album for the millions of us who have spent many idle hours contemplating whether we ought to be honest with ourselves and just get massively into knives.

"Getting Into Knives" album announcing 11 August, with an “As Many Candles as Possible” track premiere “Get Famous” track premiering 16 September, with video by director David Hollander

"Getting Into Knives" includes guest performance on Hammond B-3 organ by Charles Hodges (of numerous Al Green records) & guest performance on guitar by Chris Boerner (of the Hiss Golden Messenger band).

In addition to Mountain Goats, John Darnielle is an American author whose debut novel, 'Wolf in White Van', was New York Times Best-Seller and National Book award nominee.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
1 Corsican Mastiff Stride
2 Get Famous
3 Picture Of My Dress
4 As Many Candles As Possible

SIDE B
5. Tidal Wave
6. Pez Dorado
7. The Last Place I Saw You Alive

SIDE C
8. Bell Swamp Connection
9. The Great Gold Sheep
10. Rat Queen

SIDE D
11. Wolf Count
12. Harbor Me
13. Getting Into Knives

The 4AD debut from The Mountain Goats, unavailable for many years, now reissued on vinyl.

It was the band’s second new album to be released in 2002 and it marked quite a few changes. First of all, after releasing records (and cassettes) on small record labels such as Shrimper, Ajax and Emperor Jones, ‘Tallahassee’ was the first Mountain Goats album to be released on 4AD.

It was also the first Mountain Goats album to have an official single released, for the song ‘See America Right’.

TRACK LISTING

Tallahassee
First Few Desperate Hours
Southwood Plantation Road
Game Shows Touch Our Lives
The House That Dripped Blood
Idylls Of The King
No Children
See America Right
Peacocks
International Small Arms Traffic Blues
Have To Explode
Old College Try
Oceanographer’s Choice
Alpha Rats Nest

The Mountain Goats are John Darnielle, Peter Hughes, Jon Wurster, And Matt Douglas. They have been making music together as a quartet for several years. Three of them live in North Carolina and one has moved back to Rochester.

Their songs often seek out dark lairs within which terrible monsters dwell, but their mission is to retrieve the treasure from the dark lair & persuade the terrible monsters inside to seek out the path of redemption. As Axl Rose once memorably asked, in the song “Terrible Monster”: “What’s so terrible about monsters, anyway?” This is the question The Mountain Goats have been doggedly pursuing since 1991. They will never leave off this quest until every option has been exhausted. Thank You.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: As far as concept albums about gaming, i'm all in, and this one is lovely. It's a strange but perfectly formed beast, with smooth scales interspersed with fiery outbursts. Another wonderfully formed outing from The Mountain Goats.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
Done Bleeding
Younger
Passaic 1975

SIDE B
Clemency For The Wizard King
Possum By Night
In League With Dragons

SIDE C
7. Doc Gooden
8. Going Invisible 2
9. Waylon Jennings Live!

SIDE D
10. Cadaver Sniffing Dog
11. An Antidote For Strychnine
12. Sicilian Crest

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.