Mountain Goats Dark In Here CD

At last it can be told: the story of how, when the Mountain Goats got together in early March, 2020, it was to make not one album, but two.

That's how many keepers our superhumanly prolific frontman, John Darnielle, had come up with since we'd recorded In League With Dragons in Nashville with our old friend Owen Pallett back in 2018.

The idea this time around was to work with Matt Ross-Spang, the dashing Memphis wunderkind who'd engineered that album and charmed us all with his gentle wit and old-school savoir-faire. (It's hard not to be won over when you go to record and the voice coming through the headphones drawls, "You ready, Bubba?") Matt's pitch was for us to spend a week at Sam Phillips Recording, his home base in Memphis, followed by another at the equally storied FAME Recording Studios down in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, a plan that dovetailed nicely with John's notion of corralling these songs into two complementary batches, a sort of yin and yang, one light, one dark.

The Memphis album-Getting Into Knives, which came out last October-would be brighter, bolder, marked by rich and vibrant hues; the Muscle Shoals one-Dark in Here - quieter, smokier, but more deeply textured and intense.