The Mountain Goats

I was able to catch The Mountain Goats show at the Hi-Dive Tuesday, 11-6, and I have to say it was a great show aside from the Hi-Dive's poor ability to handle a sold out show considering the lack of a box office. The opening act was a band called Bowerbirds and they were awesome with a real mellow acoustic sound and a hot girl playing accordian (how can you go wrong). I picked up their self-released album Hymns for a dark horse after their set and it is worth many listens so I might try to contact them for a feature on our site soon. The Mountain Goats themselves were great live; their songs have a real driving power that gets subdued in the recorded sessions. They played two songs off of their most recent release, Get lonely, and it was cool to hear the sparse instrumentations utilized on that album performed live. They played lots of stuff I'd never heard before, easy to do when you have the dozens of albums that John Darnielle has to pull from. Speaking of John Darnielle (who pretty much is The Mountain Goats) his voice was pretty different live, it was all over the place achieving a sort of manic quality at times and I found myself thinking of David Byrne of the Talking Heads. To tie this ramble up, I just have to say that the show was great, The Mountain Goats are great and I highly recommend picking up an album and seeing them live if you get the chance.