January 6 - The Cow Song

In one sense, this was the song so far in this year (and in This Year) which sounded least like The Mountain Goats. Which made it the song that sounded the most like The Mountain Goats.

Coming to the band more than thirty years into their career it's easy to take it as read that as a band they are a genre machine. Lovecraft In Brooklyn, Clean Slate, Cry For Judas, and No Children are in divergent enough spaces that it's not possible to assign one genre to them other than "The Mountain Goats", but in the easliest part of their career it's very easy to see John Darnielle with a guitar and a tape recorder and think you know to within a few degrees what every song will be. It's the first song of the year to use any form of electronic instrument, although it does so in the most analogue Mountain Goats way possible with a Casio drumbeat and a key sound that feels like a drunk stylophone.

This is John at play, and as such reveals a lot more than earnestness of the same period would. It's creativity through whimsy, with more in common with Frank Sidebottom than Nick Drake, and all the better for it.

And now I'm thinking of what a John Darnielle of this period would have made of Chris Sivey, another outside artist on his own journey, albeit one with a massive papier mache head and a heritage in the odd Manchester working men's clubs.