Mountain Goats,The - Dark In Here (Sealed) (LP)

When the Mountain Goats got together in March 2020, it was to make not one album, but two. The idea was to again work with Matt Ross-Spang, the dashing Memphis wunderkind. Matt pitched we spend a week at Sam Phillips Recording, his home base inMemphis, followed by another at the storied FAME Recording Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, a plan that dovetailed nicely with John's notion of corralling these songs intotwo complementary batches: one light, one dark. The Memphis album_Getting Into Knives, would be brighter, bolder, marked by rich and vibrant hues; the Muscle Shoals album _ Dark in Here, is quieter, smokier, but more deeply textured and intense.We were all aware of the mythos surrounding FAME. The second you step inside you transport to its early '60s heyday and its louche mid-'70s denouement. The room we set up in is the room where Percy Sledge sang "When a Man Loves a Woman" and where Aretha Franklin recorded "I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)." The Wurlitzer with which Spooner Oldham opens the last? It's sitting right there. Spooner is living musical history, having played with everyone from Bob Dylan and Neil Young to Linda Ronstadt and Liberace, for crying out loud. And Spooner is all over Dark in Here_any time you hear a bit of Hammond organ or electric piano chiming in without repeating a phrase.We tracked the album's one outright banger, "The Destruction of the Kola Superdeep Borehole Tower," live with Spooner, and "Mobile" and "Dark in Here" with guitarist Will McFarlane_another local veteran who played with Bonnie Raitt for years. We only had Spooner for two afternoons, though, and Will for just one. After it was just the four of us: John playing acoustic guitar and occasional piano, the rhythm section of drummer Jon Wurster and myself, and our jack-of-all-trades Matt Douglas picking up everything else. Theresult is something more stripped down and intimate than the lush arrangements of Getting Into Knives. Of "The Slow Parts on Death Metal Albums," John concedes that the so...