Hot Damn

When I started this website going on almost one year ago, it was because I wanted to share with people this song, one song in particular, by the band Songs: Ohia. It was called “Back on Top,” and at the time I would drive home and listen to it on repeat in my CD player. This would be after spending nearly the last half hour at work listening to that song on repeat.

It seemed to me that listening to one song for an hour every day for a week was a bit obsessive. But it was something I’d done with a number of songs, something CDs had made much simpler. Didn’t we all have cassettes back in the old days, pre-digital music, that we would rewind and play, rewind and play, rewind and play? My wife says she did that, and I know I did it, so I suspected other people of doing the same.

To this day, I occasionally put on that Songs: Ohia album and listen to it, pausing to repeat that specific song a few times. There’s something both painfully fragile and hopeful in the way Jason Molina cries out “When I’m back on the top again,” in his piercing wail, something that cut straight into my heart the first time I heard it and something that clearly continues to resonate with me.

All of which sounds like a strange seed to germinate into what ultimately became a site predominantly reviewing audiobooks. But there you have it.

Which brings me to my latest obsession, a sweet little track by The Mountain Goats entitled “The Plague.” My suspicion is that this song will be on their forthcoming, as of yet untitled, album, and it fits into the same darker mood of his other new songs.

To read the lyrics of a song never can quite give you the full power and depth that hearing it does, and no case is a better example than those of John Darnielle. To read his lyrics is to enter a strange world of city names, bitter relationships, drinking, and literary references. What to make of a song about The Anglo-Saxons containing lines like “Yeah, the Anglo-Saxons / A sub-literate bunch of guys, / though some sources say otherwise. / Yeah, the Anglo-Saxons”? Or the paean to Golden Boy Peanuts that recommends “If thine enemy oppresseth you / you must let him oppress you some more / so that when you go shopping in Paradise / you'll find those magnificent peanuts from Singapore” because, as everyone knows: “There are no pan Asian supermarkets down in hell /so you can't buy Golden Boy Peanuts.”

Darnielle has this power of delivery, high, nasal, penetrating, that lifts such curious lyrics up to calls to arms. This most recent song is an apocalyptic vision of plagues and punishments, unexplained, but devastating. These lyrics are fairly straightforward and fairly short.

There will be blue skies
Above the green and verdant plains.
Churns will swell with fresh butter
There will be an abundance of sweet grain.
We will rise from our sleep.
We won’t have time to choose what things we’ll keep.

And rivers will all turn to blood,
Frogs will fall from the sky,
And the plague will rage through the countryside.
Lalalala. Lalalala.
La La La
La La La
La La La.

There will be cotton clouds
Above the fields as white as cream.
There will be loud singing in the churches
As we all come out to take one for the team.
And all our great schemes and plans
Will slip like fishes from our hands.

And rivers will all turn to blood,
Frogs will fall from the sky,
And the plague will cover
The country with its anger.
Lalalala. Lalalala.
La La La
La La La
La La La.
Hey.

What can you make of a song like that? In Darnielle’s hands, it becomes a bouncy tune (witness the la la la business) while still retaining the elemental fears of such Biblical retribution. He delivers such absurd lines with such a direct manner that their essential absurdity is no longer nonsensical but absurd in the best existential meaning of the word.

There will be loud singing from the churches
As we all come out to take one for the team.

The first time I heard those lines I was almost knocked out of my seat; goosebumps ran down my arm. When I'm singing along in the car, it still gives me chills. A simple cliché like “take one for the team” in a Mountain Goats song is never used as filler, but is put into fresh surroundings and given extra strength. The way Darnielle’s voice rises after that, into his keening shout, as though he were embodying the very plague of which he sings, drives it home. The la la la’s only add a piquant fatalistic approach to the situation, an insouciance in the face of certain death.

It’s a strange song to be obsessed with lately, a bit dark, but for some reason I can’t shake it. I’ve listened to it five times right now just in writing this column. There’s something completely catchy about the song, subject matter be damned, or even embraced for that matter.

Don’t believe me? Give it a listen here.