***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 humor 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.
LP $25.95
06/28/2024
***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...
LP $22.25
10/27/2023
***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. Bleed Out is 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.
2XLP $28.50
08/19/2022
***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. Along with Oldham, Dark in Here features additional guest contributions from Susan Marshall (of Amy Grant) and Will McFarlane...
CD $13.75
06/25/2021
2XLP $28.50
06/25/2021
***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! “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
LP $17.75
03/26/2021
CD $12.00
03/26/2021
***There is always water. In flowing rivers, in falling raindrops, in waves that will tear us to pieces, in ice cold glasses toasting the living and the dead. Water can carve away at mountainsides over eons, or come crashing over the city in an instant. Animals, fugitives, loners, and crumbling signs of life swim through the depths of the MOUNTAIN GOATS’ Getting Into Knives. Like an eight-foot swell of blades, JOHN DARNIELLE, MATT DOUGLAS, PETER HUGHES and JON WURSTER ground the songs in the impermanence of permanence and the certainty of uncertainty, the casual and subtle threat that everything will come to an end. The Mississippi River slithers alongside the sprawl of Memphis, separating Tennessee from Arkansas. That constant churn fuels the city’s energy, marking it as a hub long before it became a beating heart of soul, blues, and country. The Mountain Goats tapped into that devotion by decamping from North Carolina to Sam Phillips Recording, a spot that played home to sessions for The Cramps and was designed to be a post-show hangout for Elvis Presley. The quartet packed into the studio to bask in its past, alongside guests including CHARLES HODGES, who played organ on Al Green’s genre-defining hits.
CD $13.75
10/23/2020
2XLP $22.75
10/23/2020
***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. Hardcore LP version pressed on yellow and green marbled vinyl with a bonus single, housed on double gatefold jackets inside debossed, dragon scale slipcases. Includes a Dragon League membership card and download.
fpo $42.95
04/26/2019
***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.
CD $13.75
04/26/2019
2XLP $30.25
04/26/2019
***"The theme this time around is goth, a subject closer to my heart perhaps than that of any MOUNTAIN GOATS album previous. And while JOHN writes the songs, as he always has, it feels more than ever like he’s speaking for all of us in the band, erstwhile goths (raises hand) or otherwise, for these are songs that approach an identity most often associated with youth from a perspective that is inescapably adult. Anyone old enough to have had the experience of finding oneself at sea in a cultural landscape that’s suddenly indecipherable will empathize with Pat Travers showing up to a Bauhaus show looking to jam, for example. But underneath the outward humor, there is evident throughout a real tenderness toward, and solidarity with, our former fellow travelers—the friends whose bands never made it out of Fender’s Ballroom, the Gene Loves Jezebels of the world—the ones whose gothic paths were overtaken by the realities of life, or of its opposite. It’s something we talk about a lot, how fortunate and grateful we are to share this work, a career that’s become something more rewarding and fulfilling than I think any of us could have imagined. We all know how easily it could’ve gone the other way, and indeed for a long time did."—Peter Hughes, February 2017, Charlotte, NC. CD includes a 16-page booklet. Vinyl versions cut at 45 rpm and feature gatefold jackets with spot gloss. Limited edition version pressed on opaque red (LP1 & LP2) and tracklight green...
CD $14.00
05/19/2017
2XLP $30.25
05/19/2017
***REGULAR VINYL VERSION!!! “Beat the Champ is about professional wrestling, which was an avenue of escape for me when I was a kid. Wrestling was low-budget working class entertainment back then, strictly UHF material. It was cheap theater. You had to bring your imagination to the proceedings and you got paid back double. I wrote these songs to re-immerse myself in the blood and fire of the visions that spoke to me as a child, and to see what more there might be in them now that I’m grown.”—John Darnielle, Durham, NC.
CD $13.75
04/07/2015
2XLP $30.25
04/07/2015
***The last of the “all-home-recordings albums” by THE MOUNTAIN GOATS and the only one about which that claim is true, All Hail West Texas was originally released as a free-standing compact disc on the late, lamented Emperor Jones. That was about a decade ago. The songs were originally transferred from the cassettes onto which they were recorded to 1/2” reels at Tiny Telephone by ALEX NEWPORT. Remastered from those reels, along with 7 unearthed songs from the two surviving contemporaneous cassettes, All Hail West Texas stands as the peak of the Mountain Goats’ home recording era, a time people like to refer to as “when JOHN DARNIELLE had his four-track,” except John did not actually use a four-track. He used the condenser mic of a Panasonic boombox and there was no overdubbing. All songs recorded on the day they were written, usually within minutes of the actual composition. Highlights include “Jenny,” “Fall of the Star High School Running Back,” and “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton,” a song which has compelled audiences around the globe to yell “Hail Satan,” and to mean it. Package art features a newly penned 1,800-word essay by John detailing his songwriting and recording process for the album. The LP (on vinyl now for the first time in North America) is packaged in a deluxe gatefold jacket and includes a digital download of the full record plus the seven additional tracks. The CD, which includes the full album and extra tracks on one disc,...
LP $22.45
07/23/2013
CD $13.75
07/23/2013
***JOHN DARNIELLE has written almost 600 songs now, and some of them are very sad, dealing with hard drugs and tragic ends, hurting yourself and others, sicknesses of both body and brain, off-brand alcohols. They are told in beautiful, unnerving, specific detail because he is a very good writer, and also some of them are just true stories about his own life. But many have noted that John Darnielle seems often very happy, and his demeanor on stage is almost exclusively unhaunted, ecstatic. Anyone who reads his Twitter feed knows he takes great delight in his delights: vegan cooking, fat babies, hockey, the beautiful alchemy of Chemex coffee, Anonymous 4, and playing music for people. These are the consolations; and if some of his songs suggest that there are real hells on earth, other songs remind that the heavens are equally close at hand. (Sometimes they are even the same songs.) It is my impression that this is the ecstasy John Darnielle is feeling: that thrill of having survived, escaped for even a second to enjoy those small transcendent delights, and to sing of them. Transcendental Youth is full of songs about people who madly, stupidly, blessedly won’t stop surviving, no matter who gives up on them. I can report that it is a very good album and has many more instruments on it than his early cassette tapes, including Peter Hughes on bass, Jon Wurster on drums, and, for the first time, a full horn section. And all of...
LP $18.25
10/02/2012
CD $13.75
10/02/2012
“The songs you find on this compact disc set originally appeared on two cassettes. To elaborate further about that—to say, for example, that the songs originally appeared ‘on two cassettes that were released in ____ and ____’—would misrepresent the spirit of their time. These tapes did not have release dates. No one anticipated their coming into the world, and very few noticed or cared. All previous eras cross at some point into the territory of the unimaginable, and so it is with the days of tape-trading. The obscurity in which these songs were incubated and born and brought into their faint light is a state of being which has passed into history.” —Excerpt from John Darnielle’s liner notes
2XCD $16.00
06/26/2012
MP3 $14.99
06/26/2012
***THE MOUNTAIN GOATS are a trio from the mid-Atlantic and points north, helmed by JOHN DARNIELLE (“one of America’s most startling lyricist/poets” —Boston Herald) and kept honest by PETER HUGHES and JON WURSTER. Though the Mountain Goats have been making records since the battle of Little Big Horn, All Eternals Deck is their third following the ratification by unanimous vote of their trio lineup. Having taken to the open road as soon as the act was signed into law and consolidated their powers into a focused triune weapon, the three spent 2010 making commando raids on studios up the seaboard from Tampa to Boston, recording along the way with producers JOHN CONGLETON, BRANDON EGGLESTON, ERIK RUTAN, and SCOTT SOLTER. Gravitating toward images and stories of doomed people or tribes trying to leave a scratch mark or two on some visible surface before their brief moment in the sun has slipped by forever, All Eternals Deck continues Darnielle’s career-long quest to find hard-won moments of joy in the momentary resolve of people who have recognized, in the glare of a train’s oncoming head lamp, their fate. (STREET DATE - 3/29/2011)
LP $19.95
03/29/2011
CD $13.75
03/29/2011
***A reissue of the classic 1996 Nothing For Juice album—the group’s first studio recorded effort—from the MOUNTAIN GOATS—singer/songwriter JOHN DARNIELLE along with bassist RACHEL WARE. Eighteen well-crafted tracks, including a version of Robert Johnson’s “Hellhound on My Trail, the song ”Moon and Sand” (once covered by Chet Baker), and Goat faves “It Froze Me” and “Alpha Double Negative: Going to Catalina.”
CD $7.95
06/13/2005
MP3 $9.90
06/13/2005
***A reissue of the first “proper” album from JOHN DARNIELLE and his MOUNTAIN GOATS. Originally released by Ajax in 1994, the album is a prime example of the lo-fi revolution of the mid-1990s, with nineteen songs of primitive acoustic guitar freneticism, hooks, and impassioned vocals.
CD $7.95
03/29/2005
MP3 $9.90
03/29/2005
CD $8.25
01/08/2001
MP3 $7.92
01/08/2001
***BACK IN PRINT ON CD!!!
CD $12.00
01/08/2001
MP3 $9.90
01/08/2001
***The third in a series of compilations collecting songs from the vast MOUNTAIN GOATS vault of joy. These recordings have never seen the light of day before and include some of the most difficult-to-track-down material the band has ever released.
CD $7.95
04/23/2002
MP3 $9.90
04/23/2000
***It's almost as good as if I'd died and gone to heaven. Twenty-three heavenly slices of John Darnielle pop lovin' compiled from the piles of out-of-print 7-inches, cassettes and compilations that once littered your floor. The first of three proposed volumes of collected MG works.
CD $7.95
04/23/2002
MP3 $9.90
04/23/2000
***The second in a series of three compilations of non-album Mountain Goats tracks. Includes all the songs from their Transmissions to Horace cassette, the Songs for Petronius and Songs for Peter Hughes 7-inches, as well as their tracks from a handful of compilation records on the Walt, Sing Eunuchs, Glitterhouse, Slowball, Union Pole, Pottery, WPRB, and Box Dog Sound labels.
CD $7.95
04/22/2002
MP3 $9.90
04/22/2000
CD $12.75
08/25/1997
MP3 $9.90
08/25/1997
CD $9.00
07/18/1996
MP3 $8.91
07/18/1996