Superchunk - Majesty Shredding

Nine years. That's how long it's been since we've had ourselves a new Superchunk record. No wonder it's been so shitty for me this last epoch! With the Chinese Democracy precedent of diminishing returns and the low-key manner of '01s Here's To Shutting Up, my hopes were not especially high for an up-tempo keyboard-free Chunk release, to the point where I hadn't even listened to the record a day before the team rolled into town. The Leaves In The Gutter EP bade well, but I was in too fragile a place to find that the new Superchunk disc was a disappoinment.

Dropping the laser on Majesty Shredding, I am happy, nay ecstatic, to report that Superchunk are back to rock your lame ass in a pronounced fashion. Even by Superchunk standards, this little firecracker is a good one. The first single, "Digging For Something" has a great whoa-oh hook and has been featuring stage invasions by Mr. John Darnielle of late, so you can safely assume that realness is being kept with our heroes. Wonderfully enough, it's the tip of the rock iceberg, as a solid 85% of Majesty Shredding is head and shoulders above 99% of the rock that has dropped this year. The other 15% is probably just head above, but regardless a virtual or actual trip to your favorite music purveyor is most definitely in order. Here's a link to Merge. If you are of a mind to see if the new stuff translates live, musical godsend NYC Taper has the whole MHOW set for free here.

R

Live: Superchunk with Todd Barry @ Music Hall Of Williamsburg 9.19.10

Day two of the weekend du Chunk, this one in Colonial Williamsburg. I would have made the usual trip over the bridge regardless, but the Todd Barry as the first opener made me more punctual than usual. Of course, Todd was on by the time I made it in, but was great as always. Stand-up gigs opening for rock bands are some of the toughest, but luckily Todd Barry gives less than a fuck if people are enjoying his sets, pointedly announcing that he was going over length to just irritate bored people up front. He went over well, with a ton a new material that I hope appears in some sort of recorded form very soon. Here's hoping that more good comedians appear (bumping terminally mediocre bands) in these kind of slots in the future.

Some not especially remarkable band had the middle slot, I assume they were a Merge band, but they were not nearly remarkable enough even for me to check out who they were after the fact. Luckily, I hooked up with the Brothers Johnson and the lovely Jina and our heroes were up in short order. Team Chunk have an exceptionally great new record out called Majesty Shredding, itself the reason why we had North Carolina's finest gracing our fair city. Night two was pretty bad-ass it's own self, with John Darnielle making an appearance and Todd Barry playing drums on an encore of Horror Business. Good times all around, even though it went later than my old ass would prefer on a school night.

R

01 [introduction]
02 Unbelievable Things
03 Skip Steps 1 & 3
04 [banter/guest intro]
05 Digging For Something*
06 [crowd]
07 Rosemarie
08 Art Class (Song For Yayoi Kusama)
09 Hello Hawk
10 [banter]
11 Fractures In Plaster
12 [tuning/banter]
13 So Convinced
14 Iron On
15 My Gap Feels Weird
16 Crossed Wires
17 [banter]
18 Mower
19 From The Curve
20 The First Part
21 Everything At Once
22 [encore break]
23 Horror Business (Misfits)**
24 Cast Iron
25 Slack Motherfucker
26 Precision Auto
*with John Darnielle backing vocals
**with Todd Barry on drums

The Mountain Goats - Satanic Messiah EP

John Darnielle is to metal what Craig Finn is to hardcore. Who would have thought? Darnielle's old school with his shit as well, having recently penned one of the better 33 1/3 books on Black Sabbath's Master Of Reality. Appropriate enough for the author of The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out Of Denton, I guess. Darnielle keeps up, as well: the opening track of his new four-track Satanic Messiah EP concerns a bunch of Brazilian teens waiting to see Brazilian metal merchants Sarcofago. That's a little esoteric and a lot of awesome.

The four songs were committed to tape recently in Darnielle's current hat-hang of North Carolina. They are spartan and austere for the most part, with the usual themes of trancendence and displacement. Darnielle is irritatingly prolific, and for the most part not to a fault. There have been two EPs and a full band release in the past year and all have been pretty top-notch. Satanic Messiah is being released in a limited double seven-inch run of, appropriately enough, 666 copies, but is also available in the trendy 'donate-what-you-choose' format that all the kids are doing these days. You can get the digital release as a zip in a myriad of formats here. Think about leaving a tuppence or two in the virtual coffers on your way out, ingrate. Up to the minute Mountain Goats news can be found here.

R

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