Nashville Music Blog

Elizabeth Jones

We arrived at Mercy Lounge early enough Friday night to catch most of the first band--if it weren't for the line that awaited us as we strolled up the Cannery Row parking lot. The line wasn't nearly as epic as the queue for the Protomen release show a couple months back, but it did stretch as far as the chain link fence. We kept ourselves busy by counting how many people uttered a variation of "It's sold out? Fuck!" before skulking back to their cars, clearly pissed that they blew $3 on parking for a show they couldn't get into. (Eight, not including the hangers-on hoping for a spare ticket to fall from the sky.)

By the time we made it through the line and upstairs, we discovered that Larkin Grimm was already onstage. Or at least it looked like she was. From the bar, we couldn't hear anything she was singing. We've made peace with the likelihood that we're deaf as fuck after so many shows, but we're going to chalk this up to a quiet mix and the overwhelming din of a crowd that didn't come here to see an anarchist dressed like their grandmother. From what we did hear, we weren't swayed either. Grinn played some middle-of-the road acoustic folk songs, which is to say she was boring. Whatevs.

As far as we're concerned, the show really started with Final Fantasy, the alter-ego of Owen Pallett, who is essentially Andrew Bird's gay Canadian cousin. With nothing more than a violin and a loop pedal, Pallett creates incredibly intricate landscapes composed from bits and pieces of violins and keyboards that sound like they're being played by a much larger band. We've given loop pedal users a lot of shit in the past, maybe justifiably, for being pretentious prog rock douchebags, but Pallett's use of looping was honestly mesmerizing. We didn't go into this show knowing much about Final Fantasy, but we were impressed. Really impressed. The keyboard programmed with his own voice was weird, but we'll let that slide.

Elizabeth Jones

​After Final Fantasy, we turned our attention to that favorite pastime of rock dorks, "guess the setlist." John Darnielle has the distinction of being one of the most prolific songwriters in indie rock, with 17 albums and more than two dozen singles, EPs and other miscellaneous recordings, so if he wanted, he could play a radically different set every night of the tour. Would he bust out some old school lo-fi classics like "Evening In Stalingrad" or "The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton"? (No.) Would it be too on the nose to play "Going to Tennessee"? (Yes.) Or too topical, with the release of that Twilight movie, to do a song with a vampire metaphor in it ("Alpha Rats Nest")? (Yes.)

Darnielle and the rest of the Mountain Goats came onstage at around 11:15, greeted us with "Long time, no see, Nashville" (they last played here in 2004 at Exit/In) and kicked the set off with "1 Samuel 15:23," the first of eight tracks they would play off their latest, The Life of the World to Come. If you're shocked that the Mountain Goats recorded an album completely inspired by the Bible, you haven't been paying much attention--Darnielle has been referencing religious imagery in his music for more than a decade. (He lent several of his songs to the final season of Moral Orel, a claymation parody of Davey and Goliath that tells the story of a boy in a Protestant community slowly losing his unconditional faith in God.)

Anyway, there was a time when we'd have shied away from a band churching it up and borderline preaching onstage. But something about Darnielle's earnestness makes his singing about Jesus come off with convincing sincerity. The fact that he provided a counterpoint to "Romans 10:9" with "Cotton," a song that, as Darnielle pointed out, runs directly opposite the message of "If you believe with your heart and you confess with your lips, then you will be saved" reassured us that we hadn't stumbled into a Christian rock show masquerading as indie folk. We've got to give the man a lot of credit for putting conflicting ideas out there and telling us to deal with it.

The rest of the Mountain Goats' set was largely a mixture of their more recent 4AD output, mainly songs from Tallahassee and The Sunset Tree. Songs like "Love Love Love" and "This Year" turned into impromptu sing-a-longs and Darnielle spent much of the night behind a well-worn Yamaha piano. The one exception to the night of tunes from the past decade was "Raja Vocative," off a 1995 7-inch called Orange Raja, Blood Royal that also featured New Zealand violinist Alastair Galbraith. We didn't really expect him to play anything pre-2002, and although we--and the rest of the crowd, who spent the night shouting out titles of old songs only to hear their cries of "Song for the Julian Calendar" ignored--were hoping for at least a couple older tunes.

We have to say that we were surprised at how charismatic and funny John Darnielle was. This is a guy who, to paraphrase, "kinda enjoys and specializes in uncomfortable disclosure," we expected him to be quiet and brooding. We were completely and utterly wrong. He joked about obscure video games, and not once did he lose the intimacy of the moment, even as his voice was starting to fail him toward the end of the set. As cheesy as it may sound, there were times where it seemed less like he was singing to us and more like he was singing with us. When the band started in on "No Children" to close the show, Darnielle let the crowd take over and for a moment, a sad song about the collapse of a marriage became a couple hundred people's fondest recent memory.