Good Morning!
Today we’re listening to “Mark On You” by The Mountain Goats
After Guided By Voices’ Robert Pollard, is there a more prolific songwriter than John Darnielle?
“‘Mark on You1’ is a specific story about somebody who's going after someone. Either this or 'Training Montage' was probably the first song I wrote for this, and I was like, 'Oh man, this feels like a vein.' Revenge is something you can ardently want and you never have to be satisfied by what you get because you're not going to get it.”
~John Darnielle
Like many of us, The Mountain Goats frontman spent a lot of time during the lockdown on the couch in front of a TV. While we were watching Tiger King, he watched action movies and thrillers. Inspired, he started writing. The result was Bleed Out, the band’s 20th(!) studio record, and a concept record if there ever was one. A pastiche of film noir so many of us watched growing up and again during the pandemic’s early days. Each track feels like its own movie plotline and all the usual tropes are here; bloodlust, revenge, vengeance.
Car chases? Yep
Hostage drama? You bet.
A vague feeling of menace? All record long.
Darnielle has always been a skilled storyteller, and he does well to tell the story from inside the plot here. It’s not a straight narration so much as it is lyrics acting as puzzle pieces for you to fill in. He’s giving you a compass, not a map.
The idea may have originated in Darnielle’s mind, but this track- and record- feel more like a “band record” than some of their previous releases. Maybe it’s the sense of urgency or the up-tempo pace. Either way, producer Alicia Bognanno (Bully, Smut) deserves a lot of credit for corralling this notion into one of the richer-sounding, expansive albums in their catalog. On “Leave A Mark,” the hooks immediately take root and become load-bearing structures.
We’re a long way from the days of yelling into a boombox here. And the record is all the better for it.
Darnielle could’ve spent 2020 watching Tiger King with the rest of us. I’m glad he didn’t.
More:
“Training Montage” is followed by “Mark on You”, another rocker that may also be a literary double entendre. The mark is, on one level, the evidence carried bodily by the opponent of the justice meted out. But, with Darnielle’s inclusion of apocalyptic biblical imagery (No man knows / The hour or the day), we are left to wonder if the mark is something more sinister and universal, the mark of Cain or the Beast.
Click here to read the rest of the review.
Listen:
“Mark On You” by The Mountain Goats | Bleed Out, 2022
Click the record to listen on the platform of your choice.
As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this track!
Thanks for being here,
Kevin—
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https://music.apple.com/us/album/bleed-out/1622211546
Get Lonely is my fave. Theres just too much MG and most of it sounds very similar. Can there be too much by an artist? I feel the same way about Dylan. At a certain point he became a pastiche of himself.
Finally got some time to soak in this album and I’m obsessing a little over the song, Bleed Out. 😬
Also, some of these songs take on an interesting tone if you imagine the narrator being God. Like, yikes. I don’t know why I considered this while listening, but it’s unsettling.