The music is distracted by another concept, as well-- a meta-concept, if you will, with Tallahassee touted as the first Mountain Goats release to be recorded with a full, traditionally-instrumented rock band.
Darnielle spends most of the album teasing the listener with this promise, adding a bass here, some minimal drums there, perhaps a harmonica, before gotcha! When we finally come to a song with an actual, honest-to-God rhythm section "See America Right" it sounds disappointingly like The majority of Tallahassee , recorded with Darnielle's Extra Glenns cohort Franklin Bruno, is, like the Extra Glenns' Martial Arts Weekend , typically stripped-down Goats fare with an occasional minimal embellishment.
And as has been the case whenever Darnielle has chosen a studio over his trusty Panasonic boombox, the end result sounds somewhat thin-- especially considering the more delicate strum-style he's been developing of late.
Johnny Goat's usual lyrical acuity also comes slightly short of his usual track record, as he unveils one of the best entries from his notebook of "Love is like These transgressions are somewhat forgiven, however, by "Oceanographer's Choice", Tallahassee 's only song to truly come through with the full-band promise, and a breathtaking portrait of the usual relationship violence becoming physical.
With drums and ominous organ that finally add some urgency to the story, and sad, sliding electric guitar swooping in and out like symbolic crows, the music finally measures up to the emotional intensity of Darnielle's imagery. When the band drops out, the scene freezes, and the characters fully realize the consequences of their meltdown: "What will I do when I don't have you?
Suffice to say, if the rest of Tallahassee lived up to the standard set by "Oceanographer's Choice", we'd have a surefire candidate here for Concept Album of the Year. However, Tallahassee is not even 's second best song cycle about disintegrating love it's succeeded by Pedro the Lion's Control and Black Heart Procession's Amore del Tropico. While Tallahassee , as literature, is richly detailed, even stunning on occasion, Darnielle's apparent phobia for full-band arrangements prevents the music from keeping pace with the storylines.
It's an admirable experiment, but not one that will likely find its way to the podium come election time. Neither do you. We drank store-brand gin with fresh lime juice out of plastic cups or straight from the bottle and we spread ourselves out face-up on the wooden floors. An aerial view of us might have suggested that we'd been knocked out, but what we were doing was staking our claim.
Establishing our territories. Making good. Not on the vows we'd made but on the ones we'd really meant. You produced a wallet-sized transistor radio out of nowhere and you found a sympathetic station: somebody was playing Howlin' Wolf.
Smokestack lightning. O yes, I loved you once. O yes, you loved me more. We entered our new house like a virus entering its host. You following me, me following you. However you like. The windows were high and the walls were thick and sturdy. It was hot as blazes. The guts of summer. Always down in the sugar-deep barrel- bottom belly of summer itself.
In our shared walk down to the bottom, which bottom we will surely find if only our hearts are brave and our love true enough, we have found that it is somehow invariably and quite permanently summer. Dudley and Stephens. It was decided in by a court in the Royal Courts of Justice in London. In it, two profoundly respectable seamen, Captain Tom Dudley and Mate Edwin Stephens, lately of the yacht Mignonette, were sentenced to death for murder of their shipmate, Ordinary Seaman Richard Parker, after a bench of five judges had ruled that one must not kill one's ship- mates in order to eat them, however hungry one might be.
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