The Mountain Goats Come To The District In April 2023

The Mountain Goats are bringing their Spectral Tide 2023 Tour to The District on Wednesday, April 12, 2023. Tickets start at $36.00 plus applicable fees and go on-sale Friday, December 16 at 10:00 AM. Tickets are available at etix.com and pepperentertainment.com.

Maybe you are just like John Darnielle: In the depths of the pandemic winter at the end of 2020, the Mountain Goats frontman passed the time trapped at home in North Carolina watching pulpy action movies, finding comfort in familiar tropes and sofabound escapism. But you are not really like John Darnielle, unless the action movies you found comfort in included French thrillers like 2008's Mesrine, vintage Italian poliziotteschi, or the 1974 Donald Pleasence mad-scientist vehicle The Freakmaker. Or unless watching them brought you back to your formative days as an artist, when watching films fueled and soundtracked your songwriting jags and bare-bones home recordings and in turn inspired your 20th album to be a song cycle about the allure-and futility-of vengeance. But there's no shame in not being like John Darnielle; few people are.

The resulting performance is Bleed Out, a cinematic experience unto itself. One song about preparing to exact bloody revenge begat another song about the act of exacting bloody revenge and then more songs about and the causes and the aftermath of being driven to exact bloody revenge, each delivered with the urgency and desperation deserving of their narrators and circumstances.

Bleed Out could be all one movie, from the opening training montage to the demise in the elegiac closing title track. Songs like "Make You Suffer," "First Blood," "Hostages," and "Need More Bandages" do what they say on the tin, telling typically vivid, deliberately recognizable vignettes of desperate characters in no-win situations who plan on taking as many people down with them as they have to. But Darnielle sees these as unconnected stories that feel universal in their desire for justice, if not in their wanton bloodshed. Anthems don't get more straightforward or anthem-y than "Wage Wars Get Rich Die Handsome," tapping into an anger that's easy to reach in 2022, even if the solutions aren't.

Few people think as much, or as well, about violence and its portrayal as John Darnielle. His recent bestselling novel Devil House (his third) is all about the relationship between tragedy and entertainment, though he is careful to downplay any parallels to Bleed Out beyond a natural attraction to terrible things as a coping mechanisms, MN and Boise, ID.