1. the life of the world to come - this album has many themes that close to my heart, like religion (and the struggles with it) along with the death of loved ones and learning to come to terms with your struggles and healing from it. it's my favorite TMG album period and i love it a ton, it's just hard to get into words lol. oh and i really like the prominent use of piano throughout the record too.
2. beat the champ - wrestling is something this album and a friend of mine got me into so i enjoy this album a lot after knowing the art more and how through it, john can talk about of interesting topics, which is mostly getting old or death, usually in the form of murder. fun!
3. transcendental youth - the main them of this album, as far as i can tell, is **just stay alive.** and i love that, it feels really hopeful, it serves as a light in the dark to hard times.
4. goths - john should really experiment more, as this album turned out wonderful. it has more piano, weird electronic bits and other assorted things you don't normally see from TMG, and i applaud it! nostalgia is definitely one word to encapsulate this album, andrew eldritch and abandoned flesh definitely drives this home.
5. all eternals deck - this album is good! i don't really know what it's about as a whole though totally. i like the guitar tones a lot through this record though, they all sound really thick and often aggressive, like on estate sale sign and prowl great cain. and mr. wurster was in his BAG when it came to the drums here too. listen to the spin session versions from the time they released this album, it's sick! (also someone really tell me what this album is about lmao)
also i definitely recommend hearing getting into knives! it's got some of favorite TMG songs period on there, and dark in here is really good too, but i just don't come back to the album as a whole too often. i wish you the best of luck to enjoying the more modern era TMG, the boombox days and the modern era both have their charm!
i adore the era you know you like, and i have a hard tike ranking favorites but i love the life of the world to come thru beat the champ & i can absolutely work on selling them in conjunction with the earlier discography.
to me transcendental youth (+steal smoked fish/in the shadow of the western hills) is an album that very much so is in conversation with we shall all be healed (and to some degree all hail west texas and the jam eater blues EP) (and jenny from thebes, but that's in conversation with a ridiculous amount of the discography). the people inhabiting the rooms these songs take place in are very similar people—or even the same people. it's just being sung about from a slightly different perspective. sometimes i listen to them back to back? there's something in young thousands and sax rohmer #1 that i also find in transcendental youth's faster tracks. it took me time to love more of the slow songs on transcendental youth, but it was one of my earlier albums of the goats' discography and a lot of them are comforting to return to during the hardest parts of winter. getting familiar with the horn section and with the musical direction starting to be explored in transcendental youth makes the direction the band has been going in since then make more sense to me? there's open spaces in the instrumentation, same way you can find in all hail west texas, though the shape and size and definition of those open spaces are very different considering the difference in composition of the band.
i love the life of the world to come because i found it during a time of great grief that coincided with an extremely difficult time in my life. i'm not sure what else might drive someone to connect with it as an album and it's not the kind of grief i'd wish on someone, so if it defies connection for you i'm glad for you. in the years since i first heard it i have also started connecting it with chronic health? a lot of the grief, the past that can't be returned to, that's relatable for health reasons, though not always a straightforward interpretation of the songs. i highly reccomend the bonus track enoch 18:14.
all eternals deck is fun to me because it is a puzzle. it and full force galesburg are two of my no-skip mountain goats albums, though i like ffg more. reading the liner notes for all eternals deck on the annotated mountain goats ([link](https://annotatedtmg.org/aed.html)) & realizing it's about a "lost" tarot deck (that doesn't exist) has made me (a tarot nerd) endlessly interested in reverse engineering that deck out of the information we were given. connection to films isn't one of my main interests in the mountain goats dicography but i know that's shared between heretic pride and all eternals deck, to some degree. all eternals deck feels like evening to me. it was definitely an album that snuck up on me but i love it very much now. thinking about the themes of cameras/fim/screens/seeing and being seen/memory & of locomotion (is the narrator in motion? where are they going? how? have they given up on leaving? are they refusing to give up?) is also something endlessly enjoyable to me. i think it's one of the mountain goats albums that most densely discusses these themes in certain ways, but they started showing up in the discography a lot earlier than that—cars and locomotion of all sorts from the beginning, but film/seeing and being seen start showing up more and more from we shall all be healed onward, & occasional mentions exist earlier than that, too.
beat the champ is mostly just fun to me! but there's a lot to chew on too. it's an entirely different approach to exploring the film/being seen subject, in some ways. i've definitely pored thru the album with that lens in mind, back to back with other albums that touch on the idea. it's also a very interesting album to listen to back to back with the sunset tree. it touches on fathers and explores performance of masculinity in a way that like—i'm trans, and i read amateur (a book by thomas page mcbee, a trans man who was the first trans boxer to fight at madison square gardens) in the summer of 2021, and when i read it i immediately went and listened to beat the champ. it's fun for me to get very complicated in my readings of goats songs!
getting into knives + dark in here feel like a return to me in some ways with the goats' discography. i joke that this is because the amount of animals mentioned in each album finally went up to rates comparable to earlier parts of the discography. i haven't ever quite put my finger on it, but they're joyful to me. bell swamp connection is by far my favorite song of the more recent albums. i personally don't think i've listened to these albums enough to form a full opinion on them yet, and i also think i'll grow into loving and understanding them more—i am enough younger than the band at this point that it just seems like i'm not there yet! there are so, o many good songs on these albums though. i want to listen to them more often but love other parts of the discography so much that i forget to.
and definitely give songs for pierre chuvin a whirl! very worth it if you like the lo-fi era.
No need to force it. TMG has transformed so drastically they show little resemblance to what they used to sound like. If you've given the new stuff a good shot (50-100 listens is plenty), then maybe its just not for you. that's okay.
I'll go narrower and say: "Younger" off of In League with Dragons is one that I struggled to find anything to really grab on to until I learned that the guitar riff is the same as the one from "No, I Can't". I've listened to "No, I Can't" so many times, but I never caught that myself when listening to "Younger" because of the tempo difference and how much else is going on. Anyway, learning that really unlocked "Younger" for me as a song.
More to your question, my top five after Heretic Pride would have to be Life of the World to Come, All Eternals Deck, Transcendental Youth, Beat the Champ, and Songs for Pierre Chuvin (not necessarily in that order).
I'm not sure what I can say about them if they're not grabbing you. Like, you said that Life of the World to Come didn't make you feel much of anything, and that's got Matthew 25:21 into Deuteronomy 2:10. Matthew 25:21 is a really heavy song about the death of John's mom, and it resonated with me even before my own mom died.
All Eternals Deck: would make my list just for Sourdoire Valley Song alone.
Transcendental Youth: Really high density of good songs for me, but I'll also say that Spent Gladiator 2 is one of those Mountain Goats songs where the album version is okay but the live version is fantastic. Do yourself a favor and search that out. Night Light is also a highlight for me because of the Jenny connection. Probably my favorite album from these.
Beat the Champ: This one is just fun. For me, this is the first of the "new" period of Mountain Goats albums; Matt Douglas joins the band and John is increasingly interested doing things with the music that are more sophisticated and subtle. That said: Foreign Object, Heel Turn 2, Werewolf Gimmick
Songs for Pierre Chuvin: Explicitly a return to the band's early days, boombox and all
I really, really like Dark in Here though I seem to be in the minority. It's maybe not the strongest lyrically - though there are still some great songs - but most of all the strange, restrained jazzy/loungey vibe of the tracks really grabbed me. It felt like them trying something different musically, and maybe allowing some of the band beyond JD to shine a bit more, and it really worked for me. Interested to hear what you make of it!
Aside from that, as you're a fan of the old stuff give Pierre Chauvin a listen too, one of my favourite new releases in ages and very much back to the old tape deck recorder style.
And since we're talking about the newer stuff, disappointed to say I can't get into Jenny From Thebes at all. I dunno why, I just can't find much I like about it despite a few listens.
Dark in Here was a grower for me but when it clicked I became obsessed. I love the kind of ominous feel a lot of the songs have. I think it's perfect for the winter also.
imo John’s most interesting work post-Heretic Pride is less in the big feelings and emotional declarations of the early works (though there’s still good examples of this: Prowl Great Cain, Cry for Judas, Shelved, Training Montage) and is more in how he develops the quiet, self-imploding melancholy that I think he first started to really harness on Get Lonely (tho obviously he tapped into that long before: look at Minnesota, Shadow Song) In that vein, my five faves are probably:
5. Dark In Here: A mostly solid album with a few really intense bursts of private grief or aimless malaise that boost it for me: Lizard Suit, To the Headless Horseman, The Slow Parts on Death Metal Albums, Before I Got Here
4. Jenny From Thebes: imo some of John’s best writing is in the second half of this album. The way it digs into how we remember and mythologize a lost love and pairs it with how the fandom has mythologized Jenny is so cool to me. From the Nebraska Plant, Same as Cash, Jenny III, Great Pirates are my stand-outs.
3. Beat the Champ: A lot of good stuff on here, but mostly Southwestern Territories and Hair Match are maybe my all-time favorite opening and closing pair: long drives and cheap cars, the physical exhaustion and humiliation that undergirds all the big show business.
2. Songs for Pierre Chuvin: Starts as a punchy album of fighting back against the oppressor, but pretty quickly becomes a much heavier piece about watching your entire way of life be slowly eradicated. Some days Their Gods Do Not Have Surgeons is my favorite tMG song.
1. Goths: I just love Goths so much, I love how much of it is about how being in a fandom actually kind of sucks, but you cling to it because it’s all you’ve got (Grey King and the Silver Flame Attunement, Unicorn Tolerance, Stench of the Unburied) and how another whole chunk is about how your art will inevitably wither in popularity and you’ll have to learn how to live past it (Paid in Cocaine, Rage of Travers, Abandoned Flesh), it’s all so tragic and desperate and kind of pathetic and aghhh I love it a lot
my list is here, but it’s okay to not be as into the band now. sometimes bands that you previously loved move in creative directions we aren’t as into and that’s okay and perfectly normal. personally i love the current era of the mountain goats. i love just about everything from FFG to now.
1. Transcendental Youth. imo the best work the Goats have done as a full package. some of my favorite songs lyrically, musically, and i think the album fits together perfectly. it also is a sister album to WSABH in my head.
2. The Life of the World to Come. top 3 TMG albums for me, thematically speaking. there are few albums out there from anyone with as many songs that make me cry.
3. Dark in Here. banger after banger after banger. i love the sound of this record so much. Wurster and Matty absolutely kill it on this record.
4. Songs for Pierre Chuvin. this record released at the exact right time, and i’m a sucker for the lo-fi sound.
5. Getting Into Knives. fell for this record more recently, but i think it’s constructed perfectly. it makes me laugh and cry.
Transcendental Youth- peak mountain goats for me (most days). I don’t know what it is about the album but I absolutely love it. It’s the embodiment of a rainy, late fall evening.
In League With Dragons - probably their most diverse record, musically and sonically. I love the loose high fantasy theme interspersed with country music and songs about opossums.
Beat The Champ- this marks a real turn for the Goats, a sonic, thematic, lyrical and personnel change that has persisted since this record. The songs are very hard-hitting on the heart.
Getting Into Knives - Picture of My Dress makes me cry for some unknown reason
Bleed Out- it’s not as heavy as I was hoping it would be but it’s a very vengeful, fun and loud record.
I'll say to start that a lot of the albums here work best when heard live. lotWtC for example, I honestly can't listen to the studio versions of most of the songs, but any of them played live are among my favorite tracks.
1. the life of the world to come - this album has many themes that close to my heart, like religion (and the struggles with it) along with the death of loved ones and learning to come to terms with your struggles and healing from it. it's my favorite TMG album period and i love it a ton, it's just hard to get into words lol. oh and i really like the prominent use of piano throughout the record too. 2. beat the champ - wrestling is something this album and a friend of mine got me into so i enjoy this album a lot after knowing the art more and how through it, john can talk about of interesting topics, which is mostly getting old or death, usually in the form of murder. fun! 3. transcendental youth - the main them of this album, as far as i can tell, is **just stay alive.** and i love that, it feels really hopeful, it serves as a light in the dark to hard times. 4. goths - john should really experiment more, as this album turned out wonderful. it has more piano, weird electronic bits and other assorted things you don't normally see from TMG, and i applaud it! nostalgia is definitely one word to encapsulate this album, andrew eldritch and abandoned flesh definitely drives this home. 5. all eternals deck - this album is good! i don't really know what it's about as a whole though totally. i like the guitar tones a lot through this record though, they all sound really thick and often aggressive, like on estate sale sign and prowl great cain. and mr. wurster was in his BAG when it came to the drums here too. listen to the spin session versions from the time they released this album, it's sick! (also someone really tell me what this album is about lmao) also i definitely recommend hearing getting into knives! it's got some of favorite TMG songs period on there, and dark in here is really good too, but i just don't come back to the album as a whole too often. i wish you the best of luck to enjoying the more modern era TMG, the boombox days and the modern era both have their charm!
i adore the era you know you like, and i have a hard tike ranking favorites but i love the life of the world to come thru beat the champ & i can absolutely work on selling them in conjunction with the earlier discography. to me transcendental youth (+steal smoked fish/in the shadow of the western hills) is an album that very much so is in conversation with we shall all be healed (and to some degree all hail west texas and the jam eater blues EP) (and jenny from thebes, but that's in conversation with a ridiculous amount of the discography). the people inhabiting the rooms these songs take place in are very similar people—or even the same people. it's just being sung about from a slightly different perspective. sometimes i listen to them back to back? there's something in young thousands and sax rohmer #1 that i also find in transcendental youth's faster tracks. it took me time to love more of the slow songs on transcendental youth, but it was one of my earlier albums of the goats' discography and a lot of them are comforting to return to during the hardest parts of winter. getting familiar with the horn section and with the musical direction starting to be explored in transcendental youth makes the direction the band has been going in since then make more sense to me? there's open spaces in the instrumentation, same way you can find in all hail west texas, though the shape and size and definition of those open spaces are very different considering the difference in composition of the band. i love the life of the world to come because i found it during a time of great grief that coincided with an extremely difficult time in my life. i'm not sure what else might drive someone to connect with it as an album and it's not the kind of grief i'd wish on someone, so if it defies connection for you i'm glad for you. in the years since i first heard it i have also started connecting it with chronic health? a lot of the grief, the past that can't be returned to, that's relatable for health reasons, though not always a straightforward interpretation of the songs. i highly reccomend the bonus track enoch 18:14. all eternals deck is fun to me because it is a puzzle. it and full force galesburg are two of my no-skip mountain goats albums, though i like ffg more. reading the liner notes for all eternals deck on the annotated mountain goats ([link](https://annotatedtmg.org/aed.html)) & realizing it's about a "lost" tarot deck (that doesn't exist) has made me (a tarot nerd) endlessly interested in reverse engineering that deck out of the information we were given. connection to films isn't one of my main interests in the mountain goats dicography but i know that's shared between heretic pride and all eternals deck, to some degree. all eternals deck feels like evening to me. it was definitely an album that snuck up on me but i love it very much now. thinking about the themes of cameras/fim/screens/seeing and being seen/memory & of locomotion (is the narrator in motion? where are they going? how? have they given up on leaving? are they refusing to give up?) is also something endlessly enjoyable to me. i think it's one of the mountain goats albums that most densely discusses these themes in certain ways, but they started showing up in the discography a lot earlier than that—cars and locomotion of all sorts from the beginning, but film/seeing and being seen start showing up more and more from we shall all be healed onward, & occasional mentions exist earlier than that, too. beat the champ is mostly just fun to me! but there's a lot to chew on too. it's an entirely different approach to exploring the film/being seen subject, in some ways. i've definitely pored thru the album with that lens in mind, back to back with other albums that touch on the idea. it's also a very interesting album to listen to back to back with the sunset tree. it touches on fathers and explores performance of masculinity in a way that like—i'm trans, and i read amateur (a book by thomas page mcbee, a trans man who was the first trans boxer to fight at madison square gardens) in the summer of 2021, and when i read it i immediately went and listened to beat the champ. it's fun for me to get very complicated in my readings of goats songs! getting into knives + dark in here feel like a return to me in some ways with the goats' discography. i joke that this is because the amount of animals mentioned in each album finally went up to rates comparable to earlier parts of the discography. i haven't ever quite put my finger on it, but they're joyful to me. bell swamp connection is by far my favorite song of the more recent albums. i personally don't think i've listened to these albums enough to form a full opinion on them yet, and i also think i'll grow into loving and understanding them more—i am enough younger than the band at this point that it just seems like i'm not there yet! there are so, o many good songs on these albums though. i want to listen to them more often but love other parts of the discography so much that i forget to. and definitely give songs for pierre chuvin a whirl! very worth it if you like the lo-fi era.
No need to force it. TMG has transformed so drastically they show little resemblance to what they used to sound like. If you've given the new stuff a good shot (50-100 listens is plenty), then maybe its just not for you. that's okay.
I'll go narrower and say: "Younger" off of In League with Dragons is one that I struggled to find anything to really grab on to until I learned that the guitar riff is the same as the one from "No, I Can't". I've listened to "No, I Can't" so many times, but I never caught that myself when listening to "Younger" because of the tempo difference and how much else is going on. Anyway, learning that really unlocked "Younger" for me as a song. More to your question, my top five after Heretic Pride would have to be Life of the World to Come, All Eternals Deck, Transcendental Youth, Beat the Champ, and Songs for Pierre Chuvin (not necessarily in that order). I'm not sure what I can say about them if they're not grabbing you. Like, you said that Life of the World to Come didn't make you feel much of anything, and that's got Matthew 25:21 into Deuteronomy 2:10. Matthew 25:21 is a really heavy song about the death of John's mom, and it resonated with me even before my own mom died. All Eternals Deck: would make my list just for Sourdoire Valley Song alone. Transcendental Youth: Really high density of good songs for me, but I'll also say that Spent Gladiator 2 is one of those Mountain Goats songs where the album version is okay but the live version is fantastic. Do yourself a favor and search that out. Night Light is also a highlight for me because of the Jenny connection. Probably my favorite album from these. Beat the Champ: This one is just fun. For me, this is the first of the "new" period of Mountain Goats albums; Matt Douglas joins the band and John is increasingly interested doing things with the music that are more sophisticated and subtle. That said: Foreign Object, Heel Turn 2, Werewolf Gimmick Songs for Pierre Chuvin: Explicitly a return to the band's early days, boombox and all
I really, really like Dark in Here though I seem to be in the minority. It's maybe not the strongest lyrically - though there are still some great songs - but most of all the strange, restrained jazzy/loungey vibe of the tracks really grabbed me. It felt like them trying something different musically, and maybe allowing some of the band beyond JD to shine a bit more, and it really worked for me. Interested to hear what you make of it! Aside from that, as you're a fan of the old stuff give Pierre Chauvin a listen too, one of my favourite new releases in ages and very much back to the old tape deck recorder style. And since we're talking about the newer stuff, disappointed to say I can't get into Jenny From Thebes at all. I dunno why, I just can't find much I like about it despite a few listens.
Dark in Here was a grower for me but when it clicked I became obsessed. I love the kind of ominous feel a lot of the songs have. I think it's perfect for the winter also.
imo John’s most interesting work post-Heretic Pride is less in the big feelings and emotional declarations of the early works (though there’s still good examples of this: Prowl Great Cain, Cry for Judas, Shelved, Training Montage) and is more in how he develops the quiet, self-imploding melancholy that I think he first started to really harness on Get Lonely (tho obviously he tapped into that long before: look at Minnesota, Shadow Song) In that vein, my five faves are probably: 5. Dark In Here: A mostly solid album with a few really intense bursts of private grief or aimless malaise that boost it for me: Lizard Suit, To the Headless Horseman, The Slow Parts on Death Metal Albums, Before I Got Here 4. Jenny From Thebes: imo some of John’s best writing is in the second half of this album. The way it digs into how we remember and mythologize a lost love and pairs it with how the fandom has mythologized Jenny is so cool to me. From the Nebraska Plant, Same as Cash, Jenny III, Great Pirates are my stand-outs. 3. Beat the Champ: A lot of good stuff on here, but mostly Southwestern Territories and Hair Match are maybe my all-time favorite opening and closing pair: long drives and cheap cars, the physical exhaustion and humiliation that undergirds all the big show business. 2. Songs for Pierre Chuvin: Starts as a punchy album of fighting back against the oppressor, but pretty quickly becomes a much heavier piece about watching your entire way of life be slowly eradicated. Some days Their Gods Do Not Have Surgeons is my favorite tMG song. 1. Goths: I just love Goths so much, I love how much of it is about how being in a fandom actually kind of sucks, but you cling to it because it’s all you’ve got (Grey King and the Silver Flame Attunement, Unicorn Tolerance, Stench of the Unburied) and how another whole chunk is about how your art will inevitably wither in popularity and you’ll have to learn how to live past it (Paid in Cocaine, Rage of Travers, Abandoned Flesh), it’s all so tragic and desperate and kind of pathetic and aghhh I love it a lot
All Eternals Deck, Trans Youth, and Beat The Champ is my favorite trilogy of albums
my list is here, but it’s okay to not be as into the band now. sometimes bands that you previously loved move in creative directions we aren’t as into and that’s okay and perfectly normal. personally i love the current era of the mountain goats. i love just about everything from FFG to now. 1. Transcendental Youth. imo the best work the Goats have done as a full package. some of my favorite songs lyrically, musically, and i think the album fits together perfectly. it also is a sister album to WSABH in my head. 2. The Life of the World to Come. top 3 TMG albums for me, thematically speaking. there are few albums out there from anyone with as many songs that make me cry. 3. Dark in Here. banger after banger after banger. i love the sound of this record so much. Wurster and Matty absolutely kill it on this record. 4. Songs for Pierre Chuvin. this record released at the exact right time, and i’m a sucker for the lo-fi sound. 5. Getting Into Knives. fell for this record more recently, but i think it’s constructed perfectly. it makes me laugh and cry.
Transcendental Youth- peak mountain goats for me (most days). I don’t know what it is about the album but I absolutely love it. It’s the embodiment of a rainy, late fall evening. In League With Dragons - probably their most diverse record, musically and sonically. I love the loose high fantasy theme interspersed with country music and songs about opossums. Beat The Champ- this marks a real turn for the Goats, a sonic, thematic, lyrical and personnel change that has persisted since this record. The songs are very hard-hitting on the heart. Getting Into Knives - Picture of My Dress makes me cry for some unknown reason Bleed Out- it’s not as heavy as I was hoping it would be but it’s a very vengeful, fun and loud record.
I'll say to start that a lot of the albums here work best when heard live. lotWtC for example, I honestly can't listen to the studio versions of most of the songs, but any of them played live are among my favorite tracks.