Explore the neon-lit streets whenever you have your headphones on 🎧
The Tapes of Night City album, featuring chill and lo-fi remixes of your favorite tracks, will be available for download via My Rewards program on Phantom Liberty launch.
The second addition to the instrumental crate is now public! If you've got music over on Spotify that you'd like me to add to the list (or maybe an artist/song that you think should be thrown into the mix), shoot me a message and let me know!
Not the best blog post on tumblr about the best ever death metal band in denton
No matter what storytelling angle they take, the Mountain Goats (Aka John Darnielle and his band of merry men) tend to be very sincere in their messaging. No matter what ethos they push, they push it wholeheartedly. That emotional message, and the way that they communicate it, varies quite a bit, but there’s a specific kind of “template” that tends to excite me the most. It goes like this: some downtrodden character from the American southeast, through some act of self-actualization, throws off whatever shackles that bind them, be they societal, mental, or emotional, and decides to just grab life by the tail, and chase whatever calling is ringing in their heart. The emotional core of these songs tends to be one of freedom, of unabashedly embracing life, and everything that comes with it, rather than hiding away. It’s a message that’s spread across several stories in the John Darnielle sonic universe (most notably the multi-song arc of Jenny), but there’s a particular one that appeals to me: “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton.”
As the title might imply, it’s a song about 2 childhood friends, Cyrus and Jeff, who, decide to start a death metal band, like a lot of bored teenagers in a small town tend to do. While it is unnamed, is the best in the town of Denton, because they’re the only one. It’s a song that doesn’t give much away about its protagonists, as if there’s more to their lives than what we get to see in the song itself. It doesn’t even really have a conclusive ending, the band just kind of breaks up after Cyrus gets sent to a reformatory school. It’s implied that he and Jeff have a plan to “get even”, but because of how vague this is in the song itself, whatever this plan is, gets left up to the listener’s interpretation. Really, the song finds its climax in a more emotional sense, rather than a thematic one. John Darnielle spends the last verse proclaiming that any amount of creativity, any amount of artistic passion, will always be worth more than any authority that tries to put it down. “The best ever death metal band outta denton / will in time both outpace and outlive you” is a phrase that can have multiple meanings, but I choose to see as an ode to the enduring power of creativity. The best ever death metal band in Denton wasn’t exactly the Beatles, but they did have the guts to just fucking try, to put some artistic ambition into the world, and that’s worth more than anything else.
“The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton '' is the opener on All Hail West Texas, an album from a period where the Mountain Goats project was pretty much just John Darnielle and a bunch of lo-fi folk recordings. However, with how it promotes chasing your dreams, and the lasting power of ambition, it sets a pretty nice precedent for the rest of the his’ catalog. Obviously, it's a message that really appeals to me, because I love this song to absolute death. I have quite a bit of work that I feel self conscious about, and I sometimes wonder if what I’m doing is even worth anything at all. But this song is a way of reminding me that my writing, my creative works, are inherently valuable, because they are creative, because they represent a willingness to just try. Because, if a failed unnamed death metal band from two high school crapouts in Denton Texas is worth something, then so is everything else.