Addendum: In League With Dragons

Subject: Addendum: In League With Dragons
Author: Thoth
Posted on: 2019-07-30 01:15:00 UTC

In League With Dragons is the latest album by the Mountain Goats. Disclaimer, I haven't listened all the way through yet, but there are a few initial impressions.

Firstly, this is a good album. I bought it on vinyl, so I obviously like it. It continues the band's talent for quickly sketching a scene and characters and doing something interesting with them in three minutes or less. And there is a lot to like. I love the title track, a chronicle of an over-the-hill wizard waiting desperately for an unreliable draconic ally, to bits (and that fact that its mellow rhythms make it feel as melodically appropriate for my own half-draconic duo as it is lyrically inappropriate for them certainly doesn't hurt...).

But the phrase "And there is a lot to like" is a heck of a loaded one, and there's a reason I'm using it. This album is solid, but it's by no means as strong as The Sunset Tree.

Why? Cohesion.

The Sunset Tree doesn't exactly tell a story, not totally, but it more or less follows the arc of one. It explores not just a general theme but a very specific collection of events in the singer's life. That gives it a nearly unbeatable throughline. And a strong throughline of some sort, narrative, thematic, emotional, or otherwise, is the difference between a bunch of good songs and a great album. It's the difference between releasing Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Help! (not that Help! is bad, it's just not as strong a cohesive whole).

By the previous camp, In League with Dragons definitely hits closer to Help! than Sgt. Pepper. Only it doesn't have the distinction of being written and recorded by one of the most important rock bands in history. And it doesn't contain any absolute classic songs like Help!. Which sounds like an insult, but very songs stack up to "Yesterday" favorably on that front.

And it's actually worse than that. You see, In League With Dragons was supposed to a rock opera. Well, I say "supposed to." That's not true. What is true is that for a while it was planned as one, and I feel that damaged the album that we got. As it stands, maybe half to a third of the songs here sort-of-kind-of tell the story of a fantasy city under siege run by an ageing wizard king, and the other half is set in the modern(-ish) day, all connected to both each other and the other half of the album by a loose veneer of ageing and of falling heroes (maybe the album's working title of "Younger" would have been a better choice). And sure, we get a pretty dang good song about Ozzy Osbourne, and another about a pitcher for the Mets, but it just doesn't come together for me. Those themes could form a good throughline for a great album, but as it stands one half of the album also has this rock-opera thing going on, which ruins the balance because half the album feels a lot more cohesive than the rest. It's like the record's got a lump in it. 2112 also did this (half rock opera, half shorter songs), and it pulled it off, but 2112 had a rock opera on one side of the LP and a bunch of individual songs on the other. It felt like a rock opera with some extra pack-in singles that were there to fill space but weren't really part of the album. Here, those rock opera elements are still there but much less substantial and sort of scattered across the whole album in a way that was probably deliberate but doesn't feel deliberate.

So in short, this album is full of great songs but collectively has the consistency of lumpy oatmeal. Draw what conclusions you may.

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Tomash reviews Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch by Tomash on 2019-07-28 04:26:00 UTC Reply

Fundamentally, I really liked Because Internet (I found it hard to put down and would've stayed up way too late reading it last night if I hadn't decided to be responsible) and I think other people here will like it too.

This is a book about the the science and history of language on the internet. It also mentions many general points about how language works (and its history) and some of the science people have been able to do using the internet that wasn't possible before.

The content of the book is presented in an way that's interesting, not particularly technical, and frequently even funny (the author is good at footnotes, for one). You will learn a bunch of things from this book, and, if you're like me, have a good time doing it. It also is very much not a "kids these days" thinkpiece, but instead is a rather exceted look at all the shiny things people are doing with words these days.

Now, on to some of the things I thought were cool (aka, the spoilers, to the extent you can spoil something like this):

- The internet means that studying informal writing is now a thing people can actually do (it's not like museums have bit collections of sticky notes people left on the fridge), and is actually making informal writing a much more widely-done thing.
- It turns out you can get really accurate maps of regional dialects using Twitter data (because folks write more informally and sometimes have their location on) (previous methods included literally having people go around a country trying to collect data by interviewing people - in an early case, someone biked around all of France)
- How there're significant differences in how people interact with the internet (and talk on it) based on when they were first exposed to the place and what they did there
- As probably most folks here know, there's a lot of things you can do with text to convey tone that've just happened over the years
- Emoji (and sometimes emoticons) basically work the same way as gestures when you're talking, and so there's different types of emoji usage (the "emblems", where the thing is basically operating like a word, and the usages that are more like the hand motions you naturally make when you're talking)
- The well-known result about how teenage girls are generally the most linguistically innovative seems to be a combination of how people learn words more when they first join a social group (as confirmed by a lot of forums) and girls having more weak ties than guys in a lot of cases
- A lot of places on the internet, like, say, the PPC, are acting as the same kind of social space that coffee shops, pool halls, and clubs are (and an interesting experiment about how people tend to leave positive, constructive comments on things if that's what the previous comments are like, and similarly for nasty ones)
- Getting a meme is basically a marker of being in a particular culture
- Overall, language is a lot more fluid than we've thought of it as being over the last few centuries, and that's good

- Tomash

Thoth Reviews... The Sunset Tree by Thoth on 2019-07-29 03:02:00 UTC Reply

When I was a young (okay, younger) lad, I tuned in regularly to the assorted musings of John and Hank Green. Judging by their subscriber count, I probably wasn't the only one, and like anything you do as a child, it definitely had an influence on me. Hank's fumblings on the guitar introduced me to the filk, and Crash Course World History with John Green was my introduction to a more nuanced view of the world around me.

None of that has anything to do with this post. What does is a video that John Green posted on June 18, 2007, where he walked through the streets of New York City for one of the very last times before he moved to Indianapolis, as a song that was like nothing I heard before in a way I still can't quite quantify played in the background.

That song was called "Love, Love, Love," and it was my introduction to The Mountain Goats. It came from an album called The Sunset Tree, which was about lead singer John Darnielle's childhood and his fraught relationship with his abusive stepfather.

Now, 12 years after John Green's departure from New York City, and at least five after I first heard the song, I have finally listened to the album as a whole.

Let just skip to the end here: if you're okay with beautiful music telling you dark and terrible things, if you're not averse to sensitive subjects, you should listen to this album. Because it is great. It sounds lovely, and the lyrics are absolutely outstanding. John Darnielle (the lead singer and songwriter of the band and only constant member) is a writer and a poet and it shows because these lyrics are dense and thick with just the right words and I love it.

Soo... songs.

The album opens with "You or your Memory" which is... an appropriate mix of nostalgic, uncomfortable, and nervous. It sets the tone for the rest of the album well as John sings about a night in a cheap hotel against a background of "Saint Joseph's Baby Asprin, Bartles and James, and you or your memory."

The next track, Broom People, is ostensibly about a girl, I think, but serves to set the scene for the rest of the album as it paints a richly detailed picture of what is presumably John's childhood home.

But the album really hits the ground running, for me at least, with "This Year", an immediately catchy tune about a day spent drinking with a girl as an escape from a hellish home against the background of an anthem of determination that is no doubt truly universal: "I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me."

"Dilaudid" may just be about the same girl, but there's no proof. It's a suitably anxious song set in a car about teenage sexuality... I think? There may also be drugs involved. The dark tone certainly doesn't make seem good.

And that dark tone is a contrast to the forced happiness of our next song, "Dance Music," as John sings about escaping from the realities of his home ("...throws a glass at her head and I run up the stairs to take cover") with the aid of his record player ("so this is what the volume knob's for") and... well, guess. The song then jumps back to what is presumably the aftermath of "Dilaudid" as John sits in a car listening to the same dance music "when the police come and get me."

"Dinu Lippati's Bones" is as beautiful as anything else on this album and seems to be a love song. But this is the point where the album gets a lot harder to interpret. I still think it's about finding refuge in music, but... I can't really prove anything. Or be sure of anything either.

"Up The Wolves" is equally undecipherable but a lot catchier. It's probably one of my favorite tracks. Whatever it means, it sure has some great lines. "There's bound to be ghost at the back of your closet, no matter where you live..."

And "Lion's Teeth" jumps back into a fraught, nervous depiction of John's struggle with his stepfather, in this case in a far less literal and more violent manner. It's a deliberately ugly, confrontational song. "There's no good way to end this. Anyone can see. There's just great big you and little old me."

"Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod" addresses more of the same conflict, but from a different, less imagined angle. It also has some of the best lyrics of the album. "And then I'm awake and I'm guarding my face, hoping you don't break my stereo, because it's the one thing I couldn't live without, so I think about that and then I sort of black out."

Don't ask me what "Magpie" is about. I don't know. Same for the song after it.

"Love Love Love" was, as I said, the first Mountain Goats song I heard. And it's still fantastic. Poetic, beautiful, and contemplative, it's about what we do for love. Good and ill. "Snakes in the grass beneath our feet, rain in the clouds above, some moments last forever, but some flare out with love love love."

And finally, "Pale Green Things." A perfect ending to the album, reflecting on what has come before as it closes the circle's with John's receiving the message from his sister that his stepfather has died. "I turned it over in my mind like a living Chinese finger trap. Seaweed and Indiana sawgrass, pale green things, pale green things."

It feels... almost wrong to be reviewing this album. It's clearly deeply personal, sometimes uncomfortably so, something that was probably recorded more for the benefit of the artist than the listener. But at the same time that just adds to the mix of clever language and raw emotion that gives this album its strength and power. It is beautiful. And it's absolutely worth listening to.

Addendum: In League With Dragons by Thoth on 2019-07-30 01:15:00 UTC Reply

In League With Dragons is the latest album by the Mountain Goats. Disclaimer, I haven't listened all the way through yet, but there are a few initial impressions.

Firstly, this is a good album. I bought it on vinyl, so I obviously like it. It continues the band's talent for quickly sketching a scene and characters and doing something interesting with them in three minutes or less. And there is a lot to like. I love the title track, a chronicle of an over-the-hill wizard waiting desperately for an unreliable draconic ally, to bits (and that fact that its mellow rhythms make it feel as melodically appropriate for my own half-draconic duo as it is lyrically inappropriate for them certainly doesn't hurt...).

But the phrase "And there is a lot to like" is a heck of a loaded one, and there's a reason I'm using it. This album is solid, but it's by no means as strong as The Sunset Tree.

Why? Cohesion.

The Sunset Tree doesn't exactly tell a story, not totally, but it more or less follows the arc of one. It explores not just a general theme but a very specific collection of events in the singer's life. That gives it a nearly unbeatable throughline. And a strong throughline of some sort, narrative, thematic, emotional, or otherwise, is the difference between a bunch of good songs and a great album. It's the difference between releasing Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Help! (not that Help! is bad, it's just not as strong a cohesive whole).

By the previous camp, In League with Dragons definitely hits closer to Help! than Sgt. Pepper. Only it doesn't have the distinction of being written and recorded by one of the most important rock bands in history. And it doesn't contain any absolute classic songs like Help!. Which sounds like an insult, but very songs stack up to "Yesterday" favorably on that front.

And it's actually worse than that. You see, In League With Dragons was supposed to a rock opera. Well, I say "supposed to." That's not true. What is true is that for a while it was planned as one, and I feel that damaged the album that we got. As it stands, maybe half to a third of the songs here sort-of-kind-of tell the story of a fantasy city under siege run by an ageing wizard king, and the other half is set in the modern(-ish) day, all connected to both each other and the other half of the album by a loose veneer of ageing and of falling heroes (maybe the album's working title of "Younger" would have been a better choice). And sure, we get a pretty dang good song about Ozzy Osbourne, and another about a pitcher for the Mets, but it just doesn't come together for me. Those themes could form a good throughline for a great album, but as it stands one half of the album also has this rock-opera thing going on, which ruins the balance because half the album feels a lot more cohesive than the rest. It's like the record's got a lump in it. 2112 also did this (half rock opera, half shorter songs), and it pulled it off, but 2112 had a rock opera on one side of the LP and a bunch of individual songs on the other. It felt like a rock opera with some extra pack-in singles that were there to fill space but weren't really part of the album. Here, those rock opera elements are still there but much less substantial and sort of scattered across the whole album in a way that was probably deliberate but doesn't feel deliberate.

So in short, this album is full of great songs but collectively has the consistency of lumpy oatmeal. Draw what conclusions you may.