New Mountain Goats & Ladyhawk albums
Two great releases this year.
They both happen to be bands that I’ll get stuck on one song by and have trouble listening to their entire albums. Right now, it’s “Lovecraft in Brooklyn” from the Moutain Goats Heretic Pride, and “I Don’t Always Know What You’re Saying” from Ladyhawk’s Shots.
Someone told me in an email that “Lovecraft in Brooklyn” might be the song of the year, and I have to agree with him. The rest of the album is good, but to be honest I’m so stuck on this song I can’t really take the rest of it in yet.
Some favorite lines:
Some kid in a Marcus Allen jersey
Asks me for a cigarette
Companionship is where you find it
So I take what I can get
And:
Woke up afraid of my own shadow
Like, genuinely afraid
Ladyhawk are a band that describes themselves as “campfire rock,” and I can totally see that. They’re very Neil Young influenced. Their first album had a variety of moods to it, upbeat as well as more darker songs. Shots has pretty much all the darker vibe to it. I’ve switched the one song I’ve been stuck on three times now. First it was “Corpse Paint”—I got obsessed with trying to figure out what corpse paint might be a metaphor for. Then came “Fear,” with these awesome lines:
Well I just want to feel something other than fear
I don’t want to go back but I can’t stay here
And I just want to taste something other than tears
I don’t want to go home but I can’t stay here
It also borrows a line from the Beatles, “I was alone, I took a ride, I didn’t know what I would find,” and it blends in wonderfully.
Now I’m stuck on “I Don’t Always Know What You’re Saying,” which I can really relate to, since I often have trouble understanding what people are saying.
I’ll post “Lovecraft” and “Fear” to the radio.blog.
P.S. What does “lovecraft in Brooklyn” mean?
I know non-BTD Greg will mock me for this, but I thought the new Mountain Goats album was too polished for my taste.
Comment by Supergenius — May 15, 2008 @ 10:40 am
Susan: See this article about HP Lovecraft. He did not like Brooklyn. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lovecraft
It’s a fantastic song, maybe J.D.’s best since Palmcorder Yajna or This Year.
SG: It’s no more polished than the last four Vanderslice-produced albums, really. The songs are louder than those on the last two albums, but I think that’s a good thing.
Comment by Greg — May 15, 2008 @ 11:07 am
Here’s the key graph of the Lovecraft article:
“Initially Lovecraft was enthralled by New York but soon the couple was facing financial difficulties. Greene lost her hat shop and suffered poor health. Lovecraft could not find work to support them both so his wife moved to Cleveland for employment. Lovecraft lived by himself in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn and came to intensely dislike New York life. Indeed, this daunting reality of failure to secure any work in the midst of a large immigrant population—especially irreconcilable with his opinion of himself as a privileged Anglo-Saxon—has been theorized as galvanizing his racism to the point of fear, a sentiment he sublimated in the short story The Horror at Red Hook.”
Comment by Greg — May 15, 2008 @ 11:11 am
Aha!
Comment by Susan M — May 15, 2008 @ 1:42 pm