Things Will Shortly Get Completely Out of Hand

The Mountain Goats wrapped their current tour at the Bell House in Brooklyn last night. I had tickets literally since the first day I could get my hands on them. The band played in larger venues in Philly and in Manhattan just the previous night, but I wanted to see one of my all-time favorite bands in a room that held 300 people. It was amazing. So amazing that when the show let out, I called my girlfriend to tell her it was amazing and that I would call her back.

Here’s the setlist:

Hand Ball
Old College Try
Cotton
Isaiah 45:23
Letter From Belgium
Deuteronomy 2:10
Enoch 18:14
John 4:16
Alphabetizing
Woke Up New
Quetzalcoatl Eats Plums
The Boys Are Back In Town (Thin Lizzy cover)
There Will Be No Divorce
Hebrews 11:40
Quito
Romans 10:9
Hast Thou Considered The Tetrapod?
Song For Dennis Brown
This Year
ENCORE 1
Psalms 40:2
No Children

ENCORE 2
Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton
Against Pollution

ENCORE 3
The Sign (Ace of Base cover)

1. That’s right; three encores. The crowd was crazy and was still applauding and screaming after “Against Pollution,” which ended with a surprising and blistering guitar solo from Thomas Gill, who was performing as Final Fantasy’s rhythm section (Thomas and Owen Pallett joined the Goats onstage for the first two encores). John came out by himself and covered “The Sign,” and actually seemed a bit flustered by the raucous applause and sheepishly said he wans’t going to tell us we were awesome because he’d already done so a lot during the course of the evening.

2. As expected, since the band is touring in support of it, The Life Of The World To Come got a lot of attention and it was great to hear these songs live while I’m still in the process of absorbing that album fully. A surprise for me, though, was the amount of attention that We Shall All Be Healed got, and some delves into the back catalog like “Hand Ball” or “Quetzalcoatl Eats Plums” and even “Alphabetizing.” These could all be tour staples, but this is the first time I’ve seen the band live, so I’m blissfully ignorant. Shockingly, the setlist didn’t include any songs from Heretic Pride; I’d have thought “Lovecraft In Brooklyn” was a shoe-in.

3. As might be expected, the crowd was as loud as the band on “This Year,” “No Children,” and “Denton.” To digress into the personal for a moment, I was afraid that they weren’t going to play “No Children” last night; it had always been a song that moved me just for the raw, emotional punch it packs, but as my marriage unraveled, it turned into a bit of an anthem for me, something that I could use to retreat and rally myself by listening to because, while it’s definitely a song that has the line “I hope we both die,” in its chorus and, as a result, is a bit of a depressing song, there’s also something uplifting about its bright, driving guitar and its frank acknowledgment that there is no way left to save things but to leave. When it came in the second encore, with the full band tearing it up instead of just John with a guitar, and 300 people shouting the lyrics along with them, I was blown away a little. In a certain angry, defiant way, it is my favorite of their songs, not just the most personal.

4. “Enoch 18:14″ is, according to John Darnielle (who, as the songwriter, should know), about the PlayStation 2 game Odin Sphere, which he explained after leading into the song with, “This is a song about playing a video game and then suddenly you start crying. The sad thing was that as soon he said what game it was, my reaction was “Oh yeah, that makes sense.” Help me.

4.5. Similarly, the intro to “Deuteronomy 2:10″ was “When you think about mortality, you can do two things: you can watch Cops or, if you’ve already seen all the episodes of Cops, you can sit down at the piano and write this song.”

5. I had an audio recording of the 3rd encore, which I was totally going to use for Friday Cover Songs, but in my enthusiasm, I forgot to save the recording.

6. Apparently Owen Pallett hurt his hand after the Manhattan show last night and was unable to play violin (which, considering that his shtick is that he plays the violin with a sampler) was problematic. He played the show on the piano that he dropped on his hand the previous night, and even injured he put on an great show. I admit to not being very familiar with FF outside of some covers that I’ve found but I was really impressed. I even bought a CD.

7. Observation on rampant hipsterism: I have never seen so many people drinking either PBR or Gennessee Cream Ale in one room at the same time. I was drinking Allagash (because it was the best thing on draft), which based on its ubiquity must be the NYC version of NEPA’s Yuengling Lager.

Tagged as: Music