The Mountain Goats new album ‘All Eternals Deck’ out 4th April
aaamusic | On 03, Feb 2011
The Mountain Goats will be releasing All Eternals Deck on the 4th April on Tomlab, download the opening track, Damn These Vampires from the album.
Speaking about the record, singer/songwriter, John Darnielle explains, “The songs cluster around themes of hidden things and the dread that hidden things inspire, but also the excitement, the attraction, the magnetic draw that scary unknown hidden things exert.” The title refers to an apocryphal tarot deck, though Darnielle explains that the album’s fascination with the occult originates in having run across the word “occult” in a textbook in his nursing-student days. “’Occult’ just means ‘hidden’ or ‘not immediately obvious’ in medical terminology. There was a nursing directive to be aware of ‘occult blood.’ I thought it was the greatest thing I’d ever heard,” he says.
In 2010, the band signed to Merge Records, head-quartered within walking distance of Darnielle’s Durham, North Carolina home. The band approached recording sessions for All Eternals Deck as commando raids on multiple studios with several producers: four songs at North Carolina’s Fidelitorium with John Congleton; one at Q Division in Boston with long-time sound-man, Brandon Eggleston; four at Brooklyn’s Mission Sound with Scott Solter; and four at Mana Recording Studios in Florida, with Morbid Angel guitarist and Hate Eternal helmsman, Erik Rutan.
“We wanted to see how disparate seasons and moods and locations and producers would play out in the songs,” explainsDarnielle. The result? “If you’ve ever watched, say, a 70s occult-scare movie where one of the scenes involves a few people visiting a store front fortune teller, getting their cards read, and then they’re trying to feel super-hopeful about their predicted outcome when what they’re visibly actually feeling is dread, then you have a pretty decent idea of what this album is all about.”
The Mountain Goats will be playing some UK shows in May – dates to be announced shortly.
