The Mountain Goats - Beat The Champ

The Mountain Goats are a playlist solid for me. When I'm heading into the deep, dark beyond of 'offline' and need some comforting tunes to take with me you can guarantee there's an album or seventeen of these guys stacked in there somewhere.

Frankly, I'm surprised I haven't posted one of their albums before. There's certainly enough of them to choose from - fifteen LPs over the last twenty years in fact!

I first discovered The Mountain Goats with their bizarro classic Palmcorder Yajna which got some airplay on Triple J back in the mid-2000's and from there I was hooked. John Darnielle, the lead singer and songwriter, started recording music on cassette using his tape deck at home (bit of the ol' play+record action). In fact, the first few Mountain Goats albums were just that - guitar, singing and tape deck hiss. The early albums are great, but the poor recording quality does start to bug me after a while.

The latest album, as you can probably tell by the album art, is about amateur wrestling. Yes. The entire album. With tracks like Foreign Object, Choked Out, and Werewolf Gimmick you can tell he's really committed to the theme. 

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This is not my favourite Mountain Goats album, but it's good fun and it's a really easy listen. I suspect with a few more listens it's going to grow on me.

For those of you that like the tunes, I strongly suggest you check out this one. It has a really impressive film clip (one of their few).