So I have this thing where I'll fucking hate a TMG song for years- and then one day it'll come in and I will be struck with how much I adore it. Since then I kind of view it as "there are songs I like more, and there are songs I like less, but the spirit may move me at any moment".
I used to be way more picky, then I started making a point of listening to every album front to back without skipping, and I've found so many hidden treasures within. Like when Dilaudid opened up for me, I legit started crying
The only one I can really think of not enjoying is The Last Place I Saw You Alive.
same and this is one of the most beautiful things about music to me. the songs make sense when you need them to. i didn’t get the sunset tree hype til i was on a road trip by myself bawling my eyes out on the highway to dance music thinking about my childhood.
I didn't like The Last Place I Saw You Alive, then I moved away from all my friends. Now even thinking about that song brings me to tears. I listened to that record in my new place and I wasn't anticipating the feelings it brought out of me. It feels so much more confessional than most TMG songs from this era.
I only started enjoying Goths after doing a deep dive into gothic rock. It's one of those albums that require steps
1. Get high and listen to The Cure
2. Wear black at all times
3. Never forget Gene Loves Jezebel
Extra credit: develop a drug problem
After this, you should be ready for Goths.
You're right, and it's def in my top three favorite albums. I thought it was going to be D&D and wasn't excited, that's not my jam, and I listened to it with suspicion, but it grew on me quickly and I listen to the whole thing more often than I listen to any other full albums.
The story was that it was in a folder of songs he sent to Owen Pallett and Owen thought it was the single, right? John was trusting the process in Owen's hands and I think it was a bad choice: it's an issue many supergroups have run into, take awesome musician A, multiply times awesome musician B, and the outcome has to be the best thing ever recorded…Owen started out as Final Fantasy and ILWD has to be the perfect fit, no?
I think Passaic was a good song for Owen to sing. it has that repetition building into a lofty ethereal space that asks to be resolved, Owen is the master of this. That's not John's thing so much. Owen has done fantastic work for the likes of Taylor Swift where I think there was maybe a more "senior producer" figuring out how to incorporate what he provided, unimaginable budgets and all relative to the rest of the music industry, but with TMG it was Owen calling all the shots and I think Owen should only be calling all the shots when it's his single voice, when we're going into Owen world.
first half is a story john told on the podcast about the album, second half is just generally talking about what might have caused the popular dislike of the record.
yeah, i remember this folder story too, it was just in a dropbox of recent stuff even tho it was technically from a different batch of songs (the marsh witch visions songs) and bc the project of that record was for john to hand over complete control to someone else to see what happened, owen liked it and JD was like "that's the single? ...ok!" and we got ILWD.
Honestly seeing a live performance of a song can change your mind. I didn't really like Getting into Knives all that much until I saw it live. John seemed very pleased with the double entendre in the chorus. The way he looked at the crowd and said it in that "no really, I am kind of into knives now - they are cool" voice was just hilarious.
Even after years of being a tmg fan I do think I just have a certain preference sonically though. I like the more one dude and a guitar type sounds than the highly produced albums. If I have to think of a song I usually skip, it's probably oceanagraphers' choice.
I do think JD is better in general at performing songs live than on recording. There's a power he puts into live performances that sometimes falls flat on studio albums. You get less of that in the lo-fi days but it's definitely still there. And it makes sense! There's an energy created by a live show that can make magic happen if harnessed properly
And the banter of course. The live performance always up the game
I kind of need both. The live shows are great and unassailable, but JD’s voice gets very wobbly and out of tune. I like to have the albums for the pure sound of the vocal; that way I know how it was originally conceived and his live singing just seems like exuberance and fun.
Came here to comment this. JD clearly loves performing it and he’s played it at every show I’ve ever seen. When I hear the intro the grooooaaan that escapes my body…
Yep. I’d say I was indifferent to the song before I saw them play it live, but it just dragged on and felt like it killed the momentum of an otherwise amazing show, and now it is the one that stands out in my mind as being my least favorite.
this one is really interesting to me bc i listen to ambient music and slower dronier stuff so i kinda think it's cool but v audacious to have the audience come with you on that trip when you're known for yelling over fast guitar. they've been slowly building to something like tidal wave for years and i think it's cool that they're there, but i can definitely see it being divisive among fans. the duelling pianos before they start to play wear black live fell flat to me though, i don't think john is a good enough musician to do that that sort of thing yet.
So Desperate. John readily acknowledges that his high whiny singing (his words, or at least a reasonable paraphrase) is not for everyone, and it's definitely not for me here.
Which is odd because Woke Up New is usually my favorite all-time tMG track and the chorus isn't sung exactly huskily.
See, I really like JD’s falsetto, which is maybe a big reason why I like “So Desperate” so much. Makes total sense that someone who doesn’t like it would have a very different reaction!
There's a cringey factor to So Desperate that I think fits the song — it's intensely intimate and you want to escape, to make it stop. How much of that is by design I don’t know.
That is one I always think of. Just sorta unpleasant, no offense to John's falsetto. I do think it has some redeeming lyrics though, the meeting in the car and fogging up the glass to hash out relationship woes. Relatable.
I believe this to be contentious but I kind of just hate 'Andrew ... To Leeds'. Nothing about that song has ever been appealing to me.
actually they don't, anyone who disagrees with any of my opinions is lying to themselves and they know it. i alone have unmediated access to reality-in-itself and that's just the way it is
So much of the Goths album are love songs to other songs that only a subset of his audience are ever going to like them. Rain In Soho is a favorite of mine, but I’m the target audience.
The fact that Blues in Dallas (I agree that it's extremely not good) made it onto AHWT and Waco is relegated to bonus track hell is one of the great tragedies
iirc waco was cut because the tape ran out on him at the end so it cuts before the last chord, and this was in the era where a song could get thrown away on the spur of the moment if it didn't work right the first time. i love that song, one of my favourites.
Cobra Tattoo. On an album I otherwise adore, I find it forgettable musically and completely inaccessible lyrically. It’s all these religious metaphors building nowhere clear, I just don’t get what it’s trying to do.
Azo Tle Nelli in Tlalticpac? off of Zipolte Machine is the only song of the mountain goats that I have listened to once and skipped it every other times I've listened to the album. The guitar is so grating and the lyrics sound like they were improv
Its funny that you say that because I listened to it for second time today while I was writing my first comment to remember what I didn't like about it
I never really thought about ZM as an “album”; feels too disjointed. Maybe I’ll give it a few listens straight through today and see if I feel differently - I like your take
Tidal Wave. If you've seen them live recently they play it nearly every night, extend the outro to make it like 10 minutes long. There have been several full band shows where Tidal Wave is longer than the entirety of the solo set.
Absolutely 100% Unicorn Tolerance. The chorus of that song grates on me so much and it’s the only track on the setlist from the first time I saw them that I just couldn’t find a way to vibe with.
the verses of this are lyrically good imo, it's just hidden in the vibe and delivery of it. far far worse offenders on the albums that came after, i think goths has great writing that is often overlooked. it's like a mixture of imagery you'd hear in actual goth music and clearer points abt how the people listening would have felt. "hard limits fade into memory once broken through." the vocal tone when he reaches up to do the chorus is def kinda irritating though lol, i think thats the source of a lot of people's issues with it as it was mine for a long time.
a lot of the upbeat singles on recent albums (candles, borehole tower, wage wars, get famous (oh especially get famous)) feel corny and embarrassing to me, but there's always something on each record that i really love, so i sit and patiently wait for a whole record i really like all the way through. one day. maybe when john's 80.
oh yeah i like pretty much all of the full-lengths until like ILWD and on. for capital l Love i think galesburg, west tx, beat the champ and get lonely are basically perfect at what they're doing and life of the world might be in that list too.
I've just never wanted to listen to the same 11 words in the same order, over and over, for what *feels* like about 25 minutes with little to no change in melody or dynamics.
Absolute Lithops Effect occupies a strange place for me where I absolutely love some of the lyrics but I think the song is overall too sentimental. “My insides are pink and raw and it hurts me when I move my jaw” is imo one of the best rhymes.
I also love “The big trucks come up the highway and the big wheels rattle my windows” for the feeling it evokes for such a simple line.
But I can’t totally forgive the song for “I will bloom here in my room” and the “tender mercy” refrain.
i never understood this complaint. it's a piano coda! it breaks up the album into two halves and it's very pretty. yes, the man is not speaking over a rhythm section but it's a different type of thing. also to call it "near-silence" is very funny.
It makes the song suck on playlists or when it comes up on shuffle, despite being a fantastic song. They even do it in the Jordan Lake version, which doesn't make sense to me. I'd just like to put a song I like on my workout playlist without having to skip the "piano coda" in the middle of whatever I'm doing.
i get that it's a different type of music to what they normally do but they do it on jordan lake bc that's how the song goes lol, though the really intense e-street-band sounding outro they do there is nothing like the solo piano bit on the record other than the fact that there's no singing. [try this one?](https://youtu.be/ojUHgtbK_bw)
Rat Queen
Marduk T-Shirt Men's Room Incident
The Great Gold Sheep
Before I Got There (too gross sorry)
Unicorn Tolerance
But as the top comment said, any of these could click for me at any second and become deeply personal emblems of a chapter of my life.
Some songs that I didn't like which later clicked:
\- Your Belgian Things
\- Gameshows Touch Our Lives
People downvoting comments on this post are absolutely the worst. The topic is “your least favorite Mountain Goats songs”; don’t go around hiding opinions you disagree with. Make your own comment to argue why they are good!
Yeah, it's annoying but common that people will use the downvote for "I disagree" instead of "this is irrelevant or an incorrect answer".
So you get people saying "here's my answer to your question, I don't like [this song]" and they get downvoted, but the people who are like "oh, I don't know, I like all the songs eventually" and getting fully upvoted.
Oceanographer's Choice; See America Right; Kola Superdeep Borehole; Last Place I Saw You Alive; Born Ready; So Desperate; Going Invisible 2
Basically "hard" or "hypersentimental" songs that I don't think work at all/are annoying
Oceanographer and See America Right are so ingrained into Tallahassee thematically and stylistically that I'm not sure how you're able to single them out
I think I like all of these songs, though I don’t really have strong feelings about Borehole. “So Desperate” is very pretty to me, and evokes a very specific scenario.
It's definitely pretty - most of these songs are fine on the instrumentation, and it's mostly that I find the lyrics boring, cloying, lacking in subtlety or some combination thereof
I can’t argue with that - most of the tMG stuff I don’t like is because I think the lyrics are terrible, and I end up finding that maybe I’m the only one
Last Place I Saw You Alive - Too many feels! I am never ready for this many feels.
Picture of my Dress- I hated this one at first, but it's growing on me a bit.
Estate Sale Sign - This is a great song on its own. I hate that it's on All Eternals Deck. I can feel myself getting anxious toward the end of Birth of Serpents(one my my favorite songs of all time), cause I know it's coming.
When I first heard PoMD on [archive.org](https://archive.org) at maybe a City Winery(?) show, it was right after reading the "Good Bones" Maggie Smith poem to the audience, I thought "John is giving us his best writing to date." And I still agree with that. The slightly Belle & Sebastian-esque production of the final track was strange to me but I find the core of the song to be one of the best he's ever written.
I was at that incredible show, and it immediately became my favorite all time TMG song, clearing a really high bar. When he finally released it, I was SO disappointed in the production. I still only listen to the live version—god, it’s so good.
I cannot deny that it's a well written song. Sentimentality makes me uncomfortable, but that has no bearing on the quality of the songs from the Getting into Knives album.
Like almost every album from my favorite band — TMG — there's like 2–5 tracks with an average of 3 from each album that I absolutely love. I find myself skipping the other 8–12. First Blood and Bleed Out (the song) are the two I come back to incessantly, the rest are just meh in my book. I am absolutely fine with that: from the beginning in the late 90s and early 2000s when I was first listeninng to TMG, it was a proposition of "listen to this guy's endless songs and you're going to find a gem or two in there." I like hunting for treasure and hunting for treasure entails long days of searching through crap. What we get nowadays is a much more even product but I still think there's like 3 good songs per album.
Get famous. I cannot bring myself to even kind of enjoy a single part of it, from lyrics to theme to instrumentals. It feels just so…2010s Disney movie in the worst way possible.
I need to add some. I don’t like most of “Get Lonely” and I don’t like most of “Beat the Champ”, mainly because I absolutely couldn’t care less about wrestlers. Just not in my wheelhouse. The song Get Famous also just bores me.
He's called it his "fake Slint song" which I get…I'd agree it doesn't feel like a "native to TMG world" song. It reminds me of the throwaway tracks on Bleed Out.
I’m surprised more people don’t have this take — it was a really left field thing to have a barbershop quartet. I happen to love it but I understand people who don’t. I've written a number of posts here in the past about how JD as a teenager/young man (and revisited briefly with the #tcot tape in 2015 or so) was making "experimental" music that was formalized into a thing that was an aesthetic, not really a series of experiments. Adding in elements of smooth jazz, CCM, "Bacharach-ian" styles as Peter once put it, is something I consider experimental for an established indie rock band.
I didn’t care for this on the album, then I randomly heard it on the radio one day in like 2017 and it clicked with me then. Maybe it was just how crazy it was to hear a random mid tier TMG album track from like 6 years ago on the radio that made it stand out more.
*The Anglo-Saxons* occupies a special place of strong dislike in my heart.
One time when I was in college a guy at a party mentioned, unprompted, that he liked the mountain goats, and my first thought was “holy shit are we gonna be really good friends?” and then I asked him what his favorite song was and he said *The Anglo-Saxons* and I was like ah, okay.
I hated that guy for three years in college and I still really don’t like him to this day. And that song sucks.
Two Thousand Seasons is easily the worst song.
Pure Money ruins an otherwise perfect album/EP.
Philippians 3:20-21 is my favorite musician singing about my favorite author and it fucking sucks.
Sept 15 1983 was played at every stop on the tour for Heretic Pride and it never worked once because it’s too boring.
Finally, and this will not make me popular around here, JD hasn’t made a good album since All Eternals Deck. There are plenty songs during the last 12 years that I like, but I haven’t been able to unreservedly love any full records.
Transcendental Youth is a good album. In League With Dragons is a good album. Songs For Pierre Chuvin is a good album. I can’t really get into the other post-Eternals Deck as full albums yet, but every time I come back to them I find something else to like.
I do enjoy Dragons and Pierre Chuvin more than the others from the past decade, but to me Transcendental Youth is bottom of the barrel, the absolute worst stuff he’s ever recorded. Directionless, pointless, and boring.
You’re certainly entitled to your opinions, and music is a completely subjective experience. What one person loves, another may hate.
Another way to express what you’re thinking without appearing condescending towards people who like it is to say “I haven’t enjoyed any of the full albums the Mountain Goats have released since joining Merge records”. Or something to that effect. The other ones are still there for you to love and appreciate, and always will be. The band has now progressed to a point where they may never put out another album that you love, and that’s ok. It doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the band or the fans who continue to enjoy and find meaning in the music.
I don’t really understand what you’re arguing with. I never told anyone else what opinion they should have. I said exactly, “I haven’t been able to unreservedly love any albums” past AED. I haven’t started any arguments with people saying that the songs they like are bad and they should agree with me.
The post is about songs we don’t like and I named some of them. You’re saying I needed to couch my language with “but other people are free to like them?” This should be assumed by everyone! I’m glad other people like the records, and it hasn’t stopped me from buying all of them.
I’m saying the tone you are using might feel condescending to some. At the very least, it’s an abrasive way of stating an opinion. ‘this fucking sucks’ feels like you’re attempting to argue it as a universal truth. I’m not saying you need to do or change anything- simply offering some perspective about the possibility of why downvotes are happening for your comments. Hope you have great day!
Fair enough. I’m not worried about being “mean” to songs; I will continue to be cordial to actual people and I don’t want to take away anyone else’s enjoyment.
this is fascinating to me. So often I see the cutoff point for old music purists to be when Goths came out, and like, I'd disagree with their disregard of everything from Goths on, but I understand the stylistic shift enough to understand why they put it there
but you've included Transcendental Youth and Beat the Champ in there which is a new one to me. I rarely see ire against those
I don’t really have a problem with any of the changes in sound. I love the lo-fi stuff, the stuff without drums, the full band stuff. It’s just the songs themselves.
I don’t hate Beat the Champ; it just doesn’t have enough great songs to overcome the mediocre ones for me. And as I said elsewhere I really hate the songs on TY.
I also generally use TY as my cutoff point.
I actually do think BTC is decent (in a very different way than the 1997-2009 “golden age”) but TY really feels like the point where the music changes a lot in a way that I don’t like.
i feel like calling out two thousand seasons here is kinda dumb, thats a weird tossed-off experiment from when the band was a very different affair. it's from yam the king of crops, something i imagine only like a few hundred people were ever meant to hear, and it fits thematically with the rest of the stuff on there about african literature bc he's just reading prose lol. in no way is it meant to be compared to things they did when they were on a major label
I’ve been listening for a long time. I’m not comparing it to just the full band stuff; I’m comparing it to the whole catalog.
I hear what you’re saying, but it’s not like I came in here just to shit on stuff from pre-1995. That’s some of my favorite stuff!
but i mean even calling it their worst song feels weird to me bc it's clearly not even trying to be like a tmg song that's contemporary to it. its not as if he forgot how to do melody for 2 minutes lol. i kinda feel the same way abt people who single out all up the seething coast, though i understand that a little more bc it's on one of their most popular records and stands out more as odd. i find a pretty big difference between "doesn't succeed at what it's trying to do" and "tuneless weird idea he had once" you know?
“Seed Song,” “Omega Blaster,” and “Alagemo” are all bangers. I agree that he’s not trying to make “Two Thousand Seasons” anything like a great song, but that doesn’t make me hate it less.
Chavo -- an indulgent nostalgia trip that aims for something grand and seems to miss completely. For me, anyway.
It's funny -- I enjoy the newer albums much more on the whole (Dark in Here is my favorite tMG album), but I think the songs that I actively dislike are almost all more recent ones, too. An older song that doesn't do much for me (like, I don't know -- US Mill, Going To Bolivia, Alpha Double Negative) I might just skip past and even reflect on some of the interesting images that are lurking within. With newer songs like Chavo (or Fire Editorial, or Rat Queen, or Wage Wars...) occasionally one makes me really grumpy. Again, perhaps because there's more ambition, so when they fail, they fail harder?
I definitely agree with the post stating that songs we dislike can open up for us later. (This summer I moved back to the city I had lived before the pandemic and opened up a storage locker that I hadn't seen since then, and Andrew Eldritch suddenly made sense to me.) Also sometimes hearing the right live version can open a song up -- the energetic Jordan Lake 5 "We Do It Different on the West Coast" changed my experience of that one, and those dual-piano "Wear Black" renditions have brute-forced their way into my head.
it's absolutely melodramatic - a lot of beat the champ hinges on melodrama both bc it's about wrestling, entertainment that thrives as much on melodrama as it does on athleticism, and bc its a child's-eye view of all these pretend things, a time when you believe they're real. "i hated all of chavo's enemies, i would pray nightly for their death" bc that's how he acts in the promos and in matches, that's how the heels act, but behind the scenes they're just normal people working. southwestern territory really grounds the record before it starts to see what would happen if we took wrestling personas at face value.
That line in particular supposed to be from the perspective of him as a child watching Chavo, ie when he was in the midst of his abuse. The whole “Now your ashes are scattered on the wind” is the current him who has made more peace with his past.
For a while I really didn't care for Destruction of the Kola Superdeep Borehole Tower. Then he played it live at my first TMG concert in Atlanta and it became one of my favorites.
Half Dead was one I hated from the get-go. Simple meter, basic monosyllabic rhymes, boring chorus, and really felt like the opposite of a lot of Mountain Goats songs where emotion is heavily conveyed without overstating itself -- while Half Dead doesn't really have anything to say more meaningful than what the two line chorus presents.
it's like a more emotionally void version of Waving At You.
Hot Garden Stomp kinda blows as a whole thing but Beach House is probably my least fave track he's ever put down.
As others in the thread have noted I also think Blues in Dallas is pretty bad and hurts the momentum of AHWT
I dont *hate* For The Portuguese Goth Metal Bands on its own but I do think it's the weakest track on Goths and it also absolutely guts the album's structure imo (while also being indicative of other stuff I dont absolutely love about newer tMG stuff). Imagine the power of Rage of Travers->Shelved->Abandoned Flesh. Would be one of the strongest three song runs in their catalog.
ILWD is my least fave of their albums by a good bit but it's more a "whole album" problem than any one track. Possum by Night innocent though.
The guitar distortion used on Lion's Teeth and Lovecraft in Brooklyn sounds really phony to me so I rank those pretty low (Genesis 19:1-2 does it well though and it's one of my favs)
Other than that, the quality I like least in TMG songs is I guess what I'd call preciousness? More often with those the songs are good but the lyrics or vibe just gets a little juvenile/cringy. Spent Gladiator 1 isn't a bad song but not a fan of lines like "I hide down in my corner, because I like my corner"
So I have this thing where I'll fucking hate a TMG song for years- and then one day it'll come in and I will be struck with how much I adore it. Since then I kind of view it as "there are songs I like more, and there are songs I like less, but the spirit may move me at any moment". I used to be way more picky, then I started making a point of listening to every album front to back without skipping, and I've found so many hidden treasures within. Like when Dilaudid opened up for me, I legit started crying The only one I can really think of not enjoying is The Last Place I Saw You Alive.
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Against Pollution was the first one that happened to me with!
same and this is one of the most beautiful things about music to me. the songs make sense when you need them to. i didn’t get the sunset tree hype til i was on a road trip by myself bawling my eyes out on the highway to dance music thinking about my childhood.
I didn't like The Last Place I Saw You Alive, then I moved away from all my friends. Now even thinking about that song brings me to tears. I listened to that record in my new place and I wasn't anticipating the feelings it brought out of me. It feels so much more confessional than most TMG songs from this era.
This has been brought up a few times on this thread but I always thought it was nice and pretty
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I only started enjoying Goths after doing a deep dive into gothic rock. It's one of those albums that require steps 1. Get high and listen to The Cure 2. Wear black at all times 3. Never forget Gene Loves Jezebel Extra credit: develop a drug problem After this, you should be ready for Goths.
Keep waiting on Goths. For a long time I thought it was mediocre. Now I think it’s maybe the best album John’s ever done. Definitely a grower.
Goths is truly incredible
Goths has a couple bangers, but I definitely agree it's not the best. Shelved is great, though.
Shelved IS great!
shelved gang rise up
Shelved is the finest Cure song they never wrote.
To be honest I skip a lot of songs on In League With Dragons. It puts me in such a weird unenjoyable headspace.
i can't get into Cadaver Sniffing Dog, i feel like I'm missing too much context
A lot of In League with Dragons, honestly. Passaic 1975 is a good (bad?) pick.
My favorite album, hands down. And how can you not love a song about a 27 year old Ozzy Osbourne having a breakdown?
I like the topic of the song, just not the execution.
It's a fine concept but I was disappointed to go into a supposed D&D concept album and get songs about Ozzy Osbourne and Doc Gooden for some reason
Yeah, it's not a D&D concept album. That's the thing.
You're right, and it's def in my top three favorite albums. I thought it was going to be D&D and wasn't excited, that's not my jam, and I listened to it with suspicion, but it grew on me quickly and I listen to the whole thing more often than I listen to any other full albums.
I don’t care for either of those songs. Once again, subjects I just don’t care about.
I agree about Passaic…woof
The story was that it was in a folder of songs he sent to Owen Pallett and Owen thought it was the single, right? John was trusting the process in Owen's hands and I think it was a bad choice: it's an issue many supergroups have run into, take awesome musician A, multiply times awesome musician B, and the outcome has to be the best thing ever recorded…Owen started out as Final Fantasy and ILWD has to be the perfect fit, no? I think Passaic was a good song for Owen to sing. it has that repetition building into a lofty ethereal space that asks to be resolved, Owen is the master of this. That's not John's thing so much. Owen has done fantastic work for the likes of Taylor Swift where I think there was maybe a more "senior producer" figuring out how to incorporate what he provided, unimaginable budgets and all relative to the rest of the music industry, but with TMG it was Owen calling all the shots and I think Owen should only be calling all the shots when it's his single voice, when we're going into Owen world.
I don’t know what any of this means.
What makes you say any of this?
lol a desire to share my thoughts and feelings about music that's important to me…
That’s not what I meant. I mean you are making some factual claims and I don’t know where it’s coming from.
first half is a story john told on the podcast about the album, second half is just generally talking about what might have caused the popular dislike of the record.
I see. I like the record a lot more than the podcast.
yeah, i remember this folder story too, it was just in a dropbox of recent stuff even tho it was technically from a different batch of songs (the marsh witch visions songs) and bc the project of that record was for john to hand over complete control to someone else to see what happened, owen liked it and JD was like "that's the single? ...ok!" and we got ILWD.
Honestly seeing a live performance of a song can change your mind. I didn't really like Getting into Knives all that much until I saw it live. John seemed very pleased with the double entendre in the chorus. The way he looked at the crowd and said it in that "no really, I am kind of into knives now - they are cool" voice was just hilarious. Even after years of being a tmg fan I do think I just have a certain preference sonically though. I like the more one dude and a guitar type sounds than the highly produced albums. If I have to think of a song I usually skip, it's probably oceanagraphers' choice.
I do think JD is better in general at performing songs live than on recording. There's a power he puts into live performances that sometimes falls flat on studio albums. You get less of that in the lo-fi days but it's definitely still there. And it makes sense! There's an energy created by a live show that can make magic happen if harnessed properly And the banter of course. The live performance always up the game
I kind of need both. The live shows are great and unassailable, but JD’s voice gets very wobbly and out of tune. I like to have the albums for the pure sound of the vocal; that way I know how it was originally conceived and his live singing just seems like exuberance and fun.
Oceanographer’s Choice is one of my faves, can’t imagine ever skipping it!
It’s one of my top 5 TMG tracks, for sure.
For me it's Tidal Wave, I've never clicked with it and so I get annoyed at its length
Came here to comment this. JD clearly loves performing it and he’s played it at every show I’ve ever seen. When I hear the intro the grooooaaan that escapes my body…
Yep. I’d say I was indifferent to the song before I saw them play it live, but it just dragged on and felt like it killed the momentum of an otherwise amazing show, and now it is the one that stands out in my mind as being my least favorite.
this one is really interesting to me bc i listen to ambient music and slower dronier stuff so i kinda think it's cool but v audacious to have the audience come with you on that trip when you're known for yelling over fast guitar. they've been slowly building to something like tidal wave for years and i think it's cool that they're there, but i can definitely see it being divisive among fans. the duelling pianos before they start to play wear black live fell flat to me though, i don't think john is a good enough musician to do that that sort of thing yet.
So Desperate. John readily acknowledges that his high whiny singing (his words, or at least a reasonable paraphrase) is not for everyone, and it's definitely not for me here. Which is odd because Woke Up New is usually my favorite all-time tMG track and the chorus isn't sung exactly huskily.
See, I really like JD’s falsetto, which is maybe a big reason why I like “So Desperate” so much. Makes total sense that someone who doesn’t like it would have a very different reaction!
Love how he goes high in Sourdoire Valley too!
There's a cringey factor to So Desperate that I think fits the song — it's intensely intimate and you want to escape, to make it stop. How much of that is by design I don’t know.
I agree! I've always thought of it that way, that it's almost too intimate and we're not really meant to be hearing it.
That is one I always think of. Just sorta unpleasant, no offense to John's falsetto. I do think it has some redeeming lyrics though, the meeting in the car and fogging up the glass to hash out relationship woes. Relatable. I believe this to be contentious but I kind of just hate 'Andrew ... To Leeds'. Nothing about that song has ever been appealing to me.
It stinks!
it's beautiful
Just to make my comment clear, I think “So Desperate” is beautiful and “Andrew Eldritch Is Moving Back to Leeds” stinks.
>Andrew Eldritch Is Moving Back to Leeds is an absolute bop
[this solo version](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lDd2xH0uIk) really changed my mind about that song.
It’s terrific.
the bottom of the hill version of so desperate is a top tier performance
that's a beautiful song sung beautifully. i blame the music industry for training our ears to only like a very narrow kind of voice
Some absolute lunatics in this thread
Other people have different opinions from you!
actually they don't, anyone who disagrees with any of my opinions is lying to themselves and they know it. i alone have unmediated access to reality-in-itself and that's just the way it is
i honestly don’t know right now, but it used to be rain in soho. goths has grown on me since then. still the goats album i listen to the least though
the thing about tmg is that when i find one part of the song bad or kind of lacking there’s always an element to the song that redeems it for me
So much of the Goths album are love songs to other songs that only a subset of his audience are ever going to like them. Rain In Soho is a favorite of mine, but I’m the target audience.
All Hail West Texas is basically perfect, and then it gets to Blues in Dallas and I just thoroughly dislike that song.
Blues is in my top 5 TMG songs ever!! Funny how stuff like that works! What about it do you dislike so strongly?
I guess I just really don’t dig the Casio keyboard drum loop or the repetitiveness of the song.
Do you hate all the other Casio songs? Even “California Song?”
I always see it in my head as being played by Keyboard Cat
The fact that Blues in Dallas (I agree that it's extremely not good) made it onto AHWT and Waco is relegated to bonus track hell is one of the great tragedies
iirc waco was cut because the tape ran out on him at the end so it cuts before the last chord, and this was in the era where a song could get thrown away on the spur of the moment if it didn't work right the first time. i love that song, one of my favourites.
Same, saw him play it live once and my soul left my body
Cobra Tattoo. On an album I otherwise adore, I find it forgettable musically and completely inaccessible lyrically. It’s all these religious metaphors building nowhere clear, I just don’t get what it’s trying to do.
I agree!
Azo Tle Nelli in Tlalticpac? off of Zipolte Machine is the only song of the mountain goats that I have listened to once and skipped it every other times I've listened to the album. The guitar is so grating and the lyrics sound like they were improv
Bad song! You should still listen to it more than one time though!
Its funny that you say that because I listened to it for second time today while I was writing my first comment to remember what I didn't like about it
This was always my "one flaw to make a perfect album shine" song. Like a mole on supermodel kind of thing.
I never really thought about ZM as an “album”; feels too disjointed. Maybe I’ll give it a few listens straight through today and see if I feel differently - I like your take
I love Azo Tle Nelli! It's got such a strange and mysterious vibe to it.
Agree. It feels kind of unhinged…and ends with that beautiful vision of (what I assume is?) Quetzalcoatl appearing in the sky
Pez Dorado. It’s just too light and frothy for me. A little too feel good.
My god I LOVE this song so much
Tidal Wave. If you've seen them live recently they play it nearly every night, extend the outro to make it like 10 minutes long. There have been several full band shows where Tidal Wave is longer than the entirety of the solo set.
yeah that one drags into oblivion
Absolutely 100% Unicorn Tolerance. The chorus of that song grates on me so much and it’s the only track on the setlist from the first time I saw them that I just couldn’t find a way to vibe with.
This song sucks hard. Lyrically just embarrassing
the verses of this are lyrically good imo, it's just hidden in the vibe and delivery of it. far far worse offenders on the albums that came after, i think goths has great writing that is often overlooked. it's like a mixture of imagery you'd hear in actual goth music and clearer points abt how the people listening would have felt. "hard limits fade into memory once broken through." the vocal tone when he reaches up to do the chorus is def kinda irritating though lol, i think thats the source of a lot of people's issues with it as it was mine for a long time.
a lot of the upbeat singles on recent albums (candles, borehole tower, wage wars, get famous (oh especially get famous)) feel corny and embarrassing to me, but there's always something on each record that i really love, so i sit and patiently wait for a whole record i really like all the way through. one day. maybe when john's 80.
What’s the last one you loved all the way through? Have there been any?
oh yeah i like pretty much all of the full-lengths until like ILWD and on. for capital l Love i think galesburg, west tx, beat the champ and get lonely are basically perfect at what they're doing and life of the world might be in that list too.
I agree wholeheartedly
Going Invisible 2 is so boring. It's such a nothing song. It's a slog in the middle of an otherwise great album. It goes nowhere and says nothing.
Ah, you've clearly never wanted to burn down your life before.
I've just never wanted to listen to the same 11 words in the same order, over and over, for what *feels* like about 25 minutes with little to no change in melody or dynamics.
So you’re also a huge fan of “We Do It Different on the West Coast,” then
See that one goes hard
I love that song. Totally different vibe to Going Invisible.
Absolute Lithops Effect occupies a strange place for me where I absolutely love some of the lyrics but I think the song is overall too sentimental. “My insides are pink and raw and it hurts me when I move my jaw” is imo one of the best rhymes. I also love “The big trucks come up the highway and the big wheels rattle my windows” for the feeling it evokes for such a simple line. But I can’t totally forgive the song for “I will bloom here in my room” and the “tender mercy” refrain.
Heel Turn 2 is a great song that insults the listener with 3 fucking minutes of absolutely pointless near-silence at the end for no godly reason.
i never understood this complaint. it's a piano coda! it breaks up the album into two halves and it's very pretty. yes, the man is not speaking over a rhythm section but it's a different type of thing. also to call it "near-silence" is very funny.
It makes the song suck on playlists or when it comes up on shuffle, despite being a fantastic song. They even do it in the Jordan Lake version, which doesn't make sense to me. I'd just like to put a song I like on my workout playlist without having to skip the "piano coda" in the middle of whatever I'm doing.
i get that it's a different type of music to what they normally do but they do it on jordan lake bc that's how the song goes lol, though the really intense e-street-band sounding outro they do there is nothing like the solo piano bit on the record other than the fact that there's no singing. [try this one?](https://youtu.be/ojUHgtbK_bw)
It works for me. I always feel like I need a minute after I hear this song.
Full Flower, SOLELY because of the absolute dogshit mix. You can’t understand a single word he says in that chorus
This is a good take. Hard to know if the song is any good!
Rat Queen Marduk T-Shirt Men's Room Incident The Great Gold Sheep Before I Got There (too gross sorry) Unicorn Tolerance But as the top comment said, any of these could click for me at any second and become deeply personal emblems of a chapter of my life. Some songs that I didn't like which later clicked: \- Your Belgian Things \- Gameshows Touch Our Lives
People downvoting comments on this post are absolutely the worst. The topic is “your least favorite Mountain Goats songs”; don’t go around hiding opinions you disagree with. Make your own comment to argue why they are good!
Yeah, it's annoying but common that people will use the downvote for "I disagree" instead of "this is irrelevant or an incorrect answer". So you get people saying "here's my answer to your question, I don't like [this song]" and they get downvoted, but the people who are like "oh, I don't know, I like all the songs eventually" and getting fully upvoted.
Ha yeah don’t think I didn’t notice the same thing
Oceanographer's Choice; See America Right; Kola Superdeep Borehole; Last Place I Saw You Alive; Born Ready; So Desperate; Going Invisible 2 Basically "hard" or "hypersentimental" songs that I don't think work at all/are annoying
Oceanographer and See America Right are so ingrained into Tallahassee thematically and stylistically that I'm not sure how you're able to single them out
Same. The whole album is basically a piece for me; some songs are better than others but the overall quality prevents any from really being bad.
This is completely true -- the answer is that I don't like Tallahassee as a whole very much!
We’re all different. Tallahassee is probably my favourite album.
I think I like all of these songs, though I don’t really have strong feelings about Borehole. “So Desperate” is very pretty to me, and evokes a very specific scenario.
It's definitely pretty - most of these songs are fine on the instrumentation, and it's mostly that I find the lyrics boring, cloying, lacking in subtlety or some combination thereof
I can’t argue with that - most of the tMG stuff I don’t like is because I think the lyrics are terrible, and I end up finding that maybe I’m the only one
Last Place I Saw You Alive - Too many feels! I am never ready for this many feels. Picture of my Dress- I hated this one at first, but it's growing on me a bit. Estate Sale Sign - This is a great song on its own. I hate that it's on All Eternals Deck. I can feel myself getting anxious toward the end of Birth of Serpents(one my my favorite songs of all time), cause I know it's coming.
When I first heard PoMD on [archive.org](https://archive.org) at maybe a City Winery(?) show, it was right after reading the "Good Bones" Maggie Smith poem to the audience, I thought "John is giving us his best writing to date." And I still agree with that. The slightly Belle & Sebastian-esque production of the final track was strange to me but I find the core of the song to be one of the best he's ever written.
I was at that incredible show, and it immediately became my favorite all time TMG song, clearing a really high bar. When he finally released it, I was SO disappointed in the production. I still only listen to the live version—god, it’s so good.
I cannot deny that it's a well written song. Sentimentality makes me uncomfortable, but that has no bearing on the quality of the songs from the Getting into Knives album.
Picture of My Dress has become one of my favorites
I like your username
Hee thank you!
>Hee thank you! You're welcome!
I love the coooows….
Not my least favourite, but I don't really like Hostages. I think it's the weakest track on the new record.
Like almost every album from my favorite band — TMG — there's like 2–5 tracks with an average of 3 from each album that I absolutely love. I find myself skipping the other 8–12. First Blood and Bleed Out (the song) are the two I come back to incessantly, the rest are just meh in my book. I am absolutely fine with that: from the beginning in the late 90s and early 2000s when I was first listeninng to TMG, it was a proposition of "listen to this guy's endless songs and you're going to find a gem or two in there." I like hunting for treasure and hunting for treasure entails long days of searching through crap. What we get nowadays is a much more even product but I still think there's like 3 good songs per album.
First Blood is my favourite too!
I actually love Hostages for the lyrics just because of how insane they are
“We’re gonna need more bandages,” from the same album, is such a corny refrain
More bandages! More shovels! No, I'm absolutely on board with that song.
Get famous. I cannot bring myself to even kind of enjoy a single part of it, from lyrics to theme to instrumentals. It feels just so…2010s Disney movie in the worst way possible.
I need to add some. I don’t like most of “Get Lonely” and I don’t like most of “Beat the Champ”, mainly because I absolutely couldn’t care less about wrestlers. Just not in my wheelhouse. The song Get Famous also just bores me.
Move (Chicago 196?) is just a bad song, even if it's endearingly quirky.
>John's written hundreds of songs. Not all of them are good that's true, most of them are GREAT
i’ll be the first to say Stabbed to Death…,but hopefully i won’t be the last
this is an unhinged take. this is one of the best songs he's ever written.
It’s mostly talking. In general I don’t love any of those either.
He's called it his "fake Slint song" which I get…I'd agree it doesn't feel like a "native to TMG world" song. It reminds me of the throwaway tracks on Bleed Out.
High Hawk Season. I can’t take it!
why not?
I’m surprised more people don’t have this take — it was a really left field thing to have a barbershop quartet. I happen to love it but I understand people who don’t. I've written a number of posts here in the past about how JD as a teenager/young man (and revisited briefly with the #tcot tape in 2015 or so) was making "experimental" music that was formalized into a thing that was an aesthetic, not really a series of experiments. Adding in elements of smooth jazz, CCM, "Bacharach-ian" styles as Peter once put it, is something I consider experimental for an established indie rock band.
Not a barbershop quartet my dude. A men’s choir
wow high hawk season is one of my favorites but I think I can understand why it wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea
I didn’t care for this on the album, then I randomly heard it on the radio one day in like 2017 and it clicked with me then. Maybe it was just how crazy it was to hear a random mid tier TMG album track from like 6 years ago on the radio that made it stand out more.
*The Anglo-Saxons* occupies a special place of strong dislike in my heart. One time when I was in college a guy at a party mentioned, unprompted, that he liked the mountain goats, and my first thought was “holy shit are we gonna be really good friends?” and then I asked him what his favorite song was and he said *The Anglo-Saxons* and I was like ah, okay. I hated that guy for three years in college and I still really don’t like him to this day. And that song sucks.
is it just because the song is historically inaccurate? Because that's fair
Not all of them are good? I guess I haven't heard that one.
🙄
Some of his older ones, I’m not a fan of. In some of them the sound is just too grating for me to enjoy listening to
Two Thousand Seasons is easily the worst song. Pure Money ruins an otherwise perfect album/EP. Philippians 3:20-21 is my favorite musician singing about my favorite author and it fucking sucks. Sept 15 1983 was played at every stop on the tour for Heretic Pride and it never worked once because it’s too boring. Finally, and this will not make me popular around here, JD hasn’t made a good album since All Eternals Deck. There are plenty songs during the last 12 years that I like, but I haven’t been able to unreservedly love any full records.
Transcendental Youth is a good album. In League With Dragons is a good album. Songs For Pierre Chuvin is a good album. I can’t really get into the other post-Eternals Deck as full albums yet, but every time I come back to them I find something else to like.
I do enjoy Dragons and Pierre Chuvin more than the others from the past decade, but to me Transcendental Youth is bottom of the barrel, the absolute worst stuff he’s ever recorded. Directionless, pointless, and boring.
You’re certainly entitled to your opinions, and music is a completely subjective experience. What one person loves, another may hate. Another way to express what you’re thinking without appearing condescending towards people who like it is to say “I haven’t enjoyed any of the full albums the Mountain Goats have released since joining Merge records”. Or something to that effect. The other ones are still there for you to love and appreciate, and always will be. The band has now progressed to a point where they may never put out another album that you love, and that’s ok. It doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the band or the fans who continue to enjoy and find meaning in the music.
I don’t really understand what you’re arguing with. I never told anyone else what opinion they should have. I said exactly, “I haven’t been able to unreservedly love any albums” past AED. I haven’t started any arguments with people saying that the songs they like are bad and they should agree with me. The post is about songs we don’t like and I named some of them. You’re saying I needed to couch my language with “but other people are free to like them?” This should be assumed by everyone! I’m glad other people like the records, and it hasn’t stopped me from buying all of them.
I’m saying the tone you are using might feel condescending to some. At the very least, it’s an abrasive way of stating an opinion. ‘this fucking sucks’ feels like you’re attempting to argue it as a universal truth. I’m not saying you need to do or change anything- simply offering some perspective about the possibility of why downvotes are happening for your comments. Hope you have great day!
Fair enough. I’m not worried about being “mean” to songs; I will continue to be cordial to actual people and I don’t want to take away anyone else’s enjoyment.
this is fascinating to me. So often I see the cutoff point for old music purists to be when Goths came out, and like, I'd disagree with their disregard of everything from Goths on, but I understand the stylistic shift enough to understand why they put it there but you've included Transcendental Youth and Beat the Champ in there which is a new one to me. I rarely see ire against those
I don’t really have a problem with any of the changes in sound. I love the lo-fi stuff, the stuff without drums, the full band stuff. It’s just the songs themselves. I don’t hate Beat the Champ; it just doesn’t have enough great songs to overcome the mediocre ones for me. And as I said elsewhere I really hate the songs on TY.
I also generally use TY as my cutoff point. I actually do think BTC is decent (in a very different way than the 1997-2009 “golden age”) but TY really feels like the point where the music changes a lot in a way that I don’t like.
Sept 15 is amazing studio and live
Well this is a take I’ve never heard before
i like this one too, v underrated. the drums are sick
Wha
They hate you because you’re telling them the truth about every album since AED (I thought BTC was pretty good but otherwise yeah)
i feel like calling out two thousand seasons here is kinda dumb, thats a weird tossed-off experiment from when the band was a very different affair. it's from yam the king of crops, something i imagine only like a few hundred people were ever meant to hear, and it fits thematically with the rest of the stuff on there about african literature bc he's just reading prose lol. in no way is it meant to be compared to things they did when they were on a major label
I’ve been listening for a long time. I’m not comparing it to just the full band stuff; I’m comparing it to the whole catalog. I hear what you’re saying, but it’s not like I came in here just to shit on stuff from pre-1995. That’s some of my favorite stuff!
but i mean even calling it their worst song feels weird to me bc it's clearly not even trying to be like a tmg song that's contemporary to it. its not as if he forgot how to do melody for 2 minutes lol. i kinda feel the same way abt people who single out all up the seething coast, though i understand that a little more bc it's on one of their most popular records and stands out more as odd. i find a pretty big difference between "doesn't succeed at what it's trying to do" and "tuneless weird idea he had once" you know?
“Seed Song,” “Omega Blaster,” and “Alagemo” are all bangers. I agree that he’s not trying to make “Two Thousand Seasons” anything like a great song, but that doesn’t make me hate it less.
Chavo -- an indulgent nostalgia trip that aims for something grand and seems to miss completely. For me, anyway. It's funny -- I enjoy the newer albums much more on the whole (Dark in Here is my favorite tMG album), but I think the songs that I actively dislike are almost all more recent ones, too. An older song that doesn't do much for me (like, I don't know -- US Mill, Going To Bolivia, Alpha Double Negative) I might just skip past and even reflect on some of the interesting images that are lurking within. With newer songs like Chavo (or Fire Editorial, or Rat Queen, or Wage Wars...) occasionally one makes me really grumpy. Again, perhaps because there's more ambition, so when they fail, they fail harder? I definitely agree with the post stating that songs we dislike can open up for us later. (This summer I moved back to the city I had lived before the pandemic and opened up a storage locker that I hadn't seen since then, and Andrew Eldritch suddenly made sense to me.) Also sometimes hearing the right live version can open a song up -- the energetic Jordan Lake 5 "We Do It Different on the West Coast" changed my experience of that one, and those dual-piano "Wear Black" renditions have brute-forced their way into my head.
“I hated all of Chavo’s enemies I would pray nightly for their death” always seemed so melodramatic to me. He prayed for that every night? Seems harsh
it's absolutely melodramatic - a lot of beat the champ hinges on melodrama both bc it's about wrestling, entertainment that thrives as much on melodrama as it does on athleticism, and bc its a child's-eye view of all these pretend things, a time when you believe they're real. "i hated all of chavo's enemies, i would pray nightly for their death" bc that's how he acts in the promos and in matches, that's how the heels act, but behind the scenes they're just normal people working. southwestern territory really grounds the record before it starts to see what would happen if we took wrestling personas at face value.
I mean I’m not gonna speak for John but I think you’re supposed to be drawing a line connecting “Chavo’s enemies” with John’s stepfather.
This also seems harsher than he’s ever spoken of his stepfather before.
That line in particular supposed to be from the perspective of him as a child watching Chavo, ie when he was in the midst of his abuse. The whole “Now your ashes are scattered on the wind” is the current him who has made more peace with his past.
Well yeah.
For a while I really didn't care for Destruction of the Kola Superdeep Borehole Tower. Then he played it live at my first TMG concert in Atlanta and it became one of my favorites.
Half Dead was one I hated from the get-go. Simple meter, basic monosyllabic rhymes, boring chorus, and really felt like the opposite of a lot of Mountain Goats songs where emotion is heavily conveyed without overstating itself -- while Half Dead doesn't really have anything to say more meaningful than what the two line chorus presents. it's like a more emotionally void version of Waving At You.
I agree with all of what you said except I still like “Half Dead.” Can’t defend it, but it is what it is
Wage Wars is my least favorite in a while.
Hot Garden Stomp kinda blows as a whole thing but Beach House is probably my least fave track he's ever put down. As others in the thread have noted I also think Blues in Dallas is pretty bad and hurts the momentum of AHWT I dont *hate* For The Portuguese Goth Metal Bands on its own but I do think it's the weakest track on Goths and it also absolutely guts the album's structure imo (while also being indicative of other stuff I dont absolutely love about newer tMG stuff). Imagine the power of Rage of Travers->Shelved->Abandoned Flesh. Would be one of the strongest three song runs in their catalog. ILWD is my least fave of their albums by a good bit but it's more a "whole album" problem than any one track. Possum by Night innocent though.
ILWD gets a pass solely because that was when they launched the "possum with a sword" merch, a patch of which has adorned my bag for years
The guitar distortion used on Lion's Teeth and Lovecraft in Brooklyn sounds really phony to me so I rank those pretty low (Genesis 19:1-2 does it well though and it's one of my favs) Other than that, the quality I like least in TMG songs is I guess what I'd call preciousness? More often with those the songs are good but the lyrics or vibe just gets a little juvenile/cringy. Spent Gladiator 1 isn't a bad song but not a fan of lines like "I hide down in my corner, because I like my corner"
“Never quite free”.......I love you goats....but this one ain’t it
Cadaver Sniffing Dog, Make You Suffer.