The Mountain Goats and Kaki King - Black Pear Tree tour EP

I came in embarassingly late to the whole Mountain Goats thing. I guess it was because I always confused them with The High Llamas, but when master drummer/exceedingly awesome individual Jon Wurster started playing with John on the regular, I began to take a little bit more notice. Eventually, I saw them at that bizarre Daily Show thing at Irving a while back and got hooked pretty quickly. As I waded into my customary spate of obsessive compulsive acquisition, I was pleasantly daunted at the the sheer volume of their output but the power of the digital age allowed me to harness the lion's share of The Mountain Goats canon fairly quickly. I spent a good month or so trying to wrap my head around the body of work. Rapp's site here was an invaluable resource in the whole thing.  That vision quest completed, I'm pleased to find that my infatuation with all things Mountain Goat has been considerably less fleeting than my two week stand with Jens Lekman.

Once Darnielle came on the radar for me, it seemed like he was everywhere. Molly had seen him around in Carolina, friends were forwarding live sets and then he and Kaki King started a mutual admiration society. It seemed a somewhat odd pairing. I had just gotten over running into her at Looking Glass and realizing that my favorite bartender at Mercury was a nightmarishly good acoustic player in the Michael Hedges school and now here she was recording with John and The Mountain Goats. Life is weird that way, but hey it's an amazing pairing that has resulted in a tour and companion tour-only EP called Black Pear Tree.

There are only six songs on Black Pear Tree, but they sure are good ones. The opening title track is a textbook Darnielle track sung mostly by King that opens with a typically detailed description of filling up a hole with compost and bears fruit for the duration. Mosquito Repellant is a selection from the more spiteful end of the TMG canon sung by Darnielle and dovetails nicely with the melancholic Bring Our Curses Home. Black Pear Tree closes with the typically pop culture relevant Thank You Mario, But Our Princess Is In Another Castle, sung from the perspective of Toad, for you dorks out there. This EP is allegedly only available on tour, but I assume you can probably get one via schiesty Ebay bloodsuckers or that it'll become more available via 4AD or some sort of download entity. It's really too good of a record to be a limited release.

Keep up with all things Darnielle and Mountain Goats related here. The lovely and talented Ms. King can be found on the interwebs here. If you are going to be in Australia next month, look out for The Mountain Goats there from 12/5 through 12/14.  There will be more goat love coming down the pike soon. Look forward to a review of John's Satanic Messiah EP later on this week.

R