I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle is the brightest and best writer of lyrics in rock. Bar none.
He’s written two books and has a novelist’s unerring knack for finding le mot juste, and he tells great stories about fucked-up marriages and tweakers circling the toilet bowl and the trials and tribulations of being young and at the mercy of monster parents and uncaring adults in general. I happen to think his 2004 concept LP We Shall All be Healed, about a band of crystal meth addicts, is one of the greatest albums ever, with 2002’s Tallahassee coming in a close second.
But my favorite Mountain Goats’ song, with the exception of “Against Pollution” off We Shall All be Healed, is the very low-fi “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton” from 2002’s All Hail West Texas. It’s just Darnielle and an acoustic guitar, telling the story of two kids who want to start a death metal band only to end up falling afoul of their parents, who are obviously terrified their progeny represent the next Columbine. It’s an angry song, a protest song even, and it ends on an inspirational note, although not of the sort one might expect.
To some rough strumming Darnielle introduces his characters, Cyrus and Jeff, who want nothing more than to become famous and fly from show to show in Lear jets. So they practice in Jeff’s bedroom and argue over band names (Satan’s Fingers, The Hospital Bombers) and stencil a pentagram on their drum kit, at which point their parents freak out and send Cyrus “to the school where they tell him he’ll never be famous.”
From there he corresponds with Jeff, devising “a plan to get even,” at which point Darnielle rises to pen the moral of the story: “When you punish a person for dreaming his dream/Don’t expect him to thank or forgive you/The best ever death metal band out of Denton/Will in time both outpace and outlive you.”
At which juncture Darnielle angrily takes up the defiant cry of kids like Jeff and Cyrus everywhere: “Hail Satan!/Hail Satan tonight!/Hail Satan!/Hail hail!” It’s a brilliant end to a brilliant song, one so evocative that Darnielle expanded it to novella length in his wonderful contribution to the 33 1/3 series of books about albums, most of which are both aridly intellectual and unreadable.
You’ll want to lift your voice along with the ending, raising Devil horns to Heaven at the sheer stupidity of adults everywhere, and you’ll marvel at how Darnielle, with just an acoustic guitar, captures the spirit of symbolic revolt that death metal represents. This is one of the 100 songs you should hear before you die, moving and inspiring, and it leaves one wondering only one thing: what was the plan the two devised to get even? Let us hope they didn’t become the next Columbine after all.
