I Saw a Show! The Mountain Goats at the Urban Lounge, 16 June 2010

Cover illustration by Robert McGinnis for George Harmon Coxe's Death at the Isthmus, 1954

It was the last night of the Mountain Goats' summer tour, and the last night of the tour can be a terrible show, depending on the circumstances. The band is tired and depressed and homesick. They've changed the setlist a few times but they're still tired of the songs they're playing. They're way past getting on each others' nerves and have moved on to actually hating each other a little. But the Mountain Goats brought their A-game Wednesday night, and turned a what could have been a "grand finally" into an actual "grand finale".

The Beets, from Queens, NY, opened the show, and I was a little puzzled to see as an opening act on a Mountain Goats tour. With simple strummed chords, bouncy melodies, and a standing girl drummer, they were definitely somewhere in the "We love the Velvet Underground" family tree, somewhere between a twee Black Lips and a bratty Modern Lovers. Standard indie-pop fare, for sure, but the Mountain Goats' John Darnielle doesn't usually stump for that sort of thing, preferring to rep for death metal and Feminist folk. To see Darnielle come out on stage and sing along on the chorus with a band that's a hair's breadth from being the Moldy Peaches just felt weird. The Beets were a decent warm-up band, though, and before long the Mountain Goats took the stage.

The touring "power trio" unit of the Mountain Goats (Darnielle with bassist Peter Peter Hughes and drummer John Wurster [on loan from Superchunk]) was sporting the right look. They resembled a trio of defrocked itinerant preachers in their frayed suit jackets - quite appropriate, as they're touring behind The Life of the World to Come, an album with Bible verses for song titles. Darnielle even takes on the preacher persona in concert, filling the set with rousing, life-affirming singalongs, contemplative hymns, and life-lesson anecdotes about his own life and the characters he writes about. A lot of fans miss the old days when Darnielle would have everyone sit Indian-style on the floor and play a whole acoustic set, sitting in a chair. To those fans, I say, "Quit your whining, nerds!" I went to a few of those shows, and they were special, but the Mountain Goats in their current live form are formidable.

They didn't play my favorite songs from The Life of the World to Come ("Genesis 3:23", "Isaiah 45:23", "Ezekiel 7") but the rest of the setlist was hard to argue with. A couple greats from Tallahassee ("Game Shows Touch Our Lives" and "Old College Try") were highlights, and I even enjoyed the perennial audience singing on "No Children" and "This Year". Darnielle seemed pretty surprised, though, when the crowd was just as willing to chime in on the verses of "Love Love Love" from 2005's The Sunset Tree - he may underestimate that one as a crowd favorite. As he often does, Darnielle did an acoustic mini-set of chestnuts in the middle of the show, which gave him a chance to play a couple I've long wanted to hear live, "The Day the Aliens Came (Hawaiian Feeling)" and "From TG&Y". I know not to expect too much from the Mountain Goats when it comes to encores - yes, they did Franklin Bruno's "Houseguest" again - but I still felt satiated at the end of the show.

You could feel that the band was running on fumes from a grueling tour, but they put everything they had left into the show, and I appreciate that. Darnielle's face seemed to beam at times with the accomplishment of having wrapped up another successful tour. He's put his "band" through a few different iterations over the years and, as a confessed homebody and introvert, he will probably never be fully comfortable in "performance" mode. But on Wednesday night he did a convincing imitation of a born showman, a performance that will probably send more than a few attendees scrambling to get better acquainted with the Mountain Goats' extensive back catalog.

"From TG&Y" by the Mountain Goats