The Mountain Goats Through This Fire Across from Peter Balkan Indie Exclusive 45rpm 2LP (Bluewater Vinyl)

Brick & Mortar/Indie Retail Exclusive! Can only ship to USA address!

The Mountain Goats, led by singer-songwriter John Darnielle, have built a prolific and influential career in indie music since the early 1990s. Known for their vast discography of storytelling and literary lyricism, Darnielle is regarded as one of the most distinctive voices in modern songwriting. Their work has a deep emotional resonance with their avid and loyal fanbase, built over the past 30 years.

Today, we find Darnielle awoken from a dream where he titled an album Through This Fire Across from Peter Balkan, with no sense of sonic direction in the dream, then proceeded to write the entire album based off of this arbitrary title. Produced by the Mountain Goats' multi-instrumentalist Matt Douglas, who also co-wrote several songs, the record is embracing, inviting, and overflowing with melody and orchestration that extends far beyond the boundaries of their past work.

For a man who used to record albums on a boom box with just his guitar for backing, Darnielle has certainly learned the value of a good, full-bodied arrangement, and his bandmate Matt Douglas has given these tracks expressive string and woodwind charts that add depth and color to the melodies, and there's a Technicolor vibrancy and dynamics in this recording that certainly go beyond what the average indie rock band is aiming for.... Darnielle has also grown as a vocalist in recent years, and if his instrument has not much more range than before, his phrasing and sense of where to place the notes and how hard to hit them is superb here....a thoughtful, dramatically satisfying experience.