The Mountain Goats are John Darnielle. Literate, energetic, sincere, and acoustic, he’s one of the best things going in music today. His lyrics manage to paint knowing pictures of real humanity with an economy and emotional strength…
There are two explanations for this CD, one considerably more credible than the other. On the one hand, this could be a bona fide comp of little-known Massachusetts bands, the tracks dug out of some long-lost archive up north of Boston…
So I saw Yo La Tengo play a lousy, boring show at Fitzgerald’s. God bless ’em, they’re my favorite band on Yaweh’s green earth, and I wanted them to rock me and lull me and pretty much paint intimate musical pictures on the empty air in front of me while I drank $3.00 Lone Stars all night. But they didn’t. Instead, they traveled back in time to re-create their classic, novice sound circa 1987-’89…
There are some things you should probably know going in. Terrastock 4 is, unsurprisingly, the fourth in a series of concerts. This and the previous three-day festivals (held in Rhode Island, England, and California) were all benefits for a fanzine called Ptolemaic Terrascope. Its focus is, as with any fanzine, whatever the editor likes, but can generally be condensed into the phrase “psychedelic music” without too much loss of intention…
It’s hard to pick on a group that has the good taste to cover East River Pipe (“Times Square Go-Go Boy”). It’s equally hard, however, to get very excited about that group when they pick that as the lead-off track, and it’s the best track on the CD…
