Droll; Jonathan Darnielle is a funny guy, and I don't mean in a Joe Pesci "What do you mean, funny? How am I funny? I'm going to beat you to a bloody pulp" way, I mean genuinely funny. It's a gig half musical spectacle; half fountain of waggish wisedom.
After playing Ox Baker Triumphant, a lone voice cries out for more wrestling songs. It is, perhaps not unreasonably, the only song they have about wrestling, although they do have forty two songs about going to places. JD reminisces how his father took him to see the big fight, wherein Ox (pictured) had requested patrons bring their hadkerchiefs, that they might dip them in the blood of his opponent. The heroes, whom JD supported, would always struggle with the underhand, dirty tactics of the villains, whom his father supported, until finally the heroes' patience would snap and they would give the rascals a taste of their own medicine. It would always seem that the dishonest methods of the bad guys were to be condemned, until the good guys started doing it, then it was OK, oh, and incidentally, American politics is based on the exact same model.
The gig starts shonkily, as JD snaps a string halfway through Dance Music, and a fruitless search for a replacement ensues, the situation only remedied when the support band lends a spare axe. It's not until a couple more songs in and JD demands they do Dance Music once again that they really take flight. It's a full moon tonight, and JD is once again wrapped in some kind of fever as he delivers Up the Wolves with kind of vengeful intent to quake even the hardest generals; the ever dependent bass of Peter Hughes at his side - a man, Pitchfork recently proposed, could be the indie-rock Andrew Ridgely. JD leaps to his defense, outlining how his boom-some bass part resussitated a forlorn, fallow stanza into a fully qualified song, Lion's Teeth, which tonight threatens to become an emotional flood. There's some moments inbetween lines when JD will make a sudden facial expression, a swoop, a shake of the head. I remember a televised of Al Green where half way through How Can you Mend a Broken Heart, he suddenly bursts with a spontaneous "OH", just off microphone, but totally spontaneous. It's one of the greatest things I've ever seen. And this display isn't not entirely unreminiscent. It's like pure evangelism.
Then they play Going to Georgia. I'm happy for the rest of the year. It is completely possessed. Love songs on the whole are a spineless mush of cooing, a clandestine masquerade to woo the opposite sex, or sometimes the same sex, toward the sack. Not only does this feature the line "the most incredible thing about you standing there in the doorway, is that its you, and you're standing in the doorway", a stanza unequalled in revelatory precision, it's a heart exploding joy. It melts the most cynical obduration. It is entirely disarming.
This is the second time I've seen MG and whilst that night I was yelping that this must have been one blazingly fine night to see them, they're equally passionate here. They climax with This Year. Yeah its a good 'un, and that fact the crowd can sing out the last few lines only makes it better. It's a response that only makes me wonder why MG aren't a whole lot bigger.
Everyone else's loss I guess.
As experienced by Greg Legwinski.
------------ A note on the support:
I never caught the name of this bearded country sextet, although there was a sign next to the stage indicatting they might be called, "This Is a No Smoking Event". Good thing, because they sure as Hell weren't on fire. Some decidely ramshackle, cliched C & W; I don't want to pick on the locals, but hey... its so easy. They shudder to a stop with a song about "do ya think I'm drinkin' too much", prompting the first ten rows or so of crowd - who'd been sat on the floor, I assumed in some appreciative, hippy-esque picnic sense - to rise up, suggesting that they had in fact been protesting French sit-in style. It's rank enough to prompt the redoubtable Stuey Bender to hypothesise that all songs about drinking are atrocious. There's The Piano Has Been Drinking (Tom Waits) and Born Slippy (Nuxx) (Underworld), but aside from that it's a lamentable tally... He also informs that he never heard back from JD after he emailed him photos from the Perth gig last year, despite, that in his opinion, there can never have been better photos of him taken in his entire life. Somehow a theory is formed that JD must hire a webmaster to filter through only mail from slavishly adoring totty enclosing "glamour" shots. Not that we're shallow or anything.
Mountain Goats in Perth, 2005.
outpatients.