In League With Dragons

by The Mountain Goats

The nature of "novelty music" is an interesting phenomenon related to the way in which we participate as audience to people making music. I tend to be a bit defensive about people dismissing music like the work of They Might Be Giants as "novelty", so what does it mean that I've observed much of the lifespan of The Mountain Goats' discography and wrestled with what I like and don't about the music he's made since the release of Beat the Champ in 2015?

Almost all of these albums have been marketed as having a "gimmick" of some kind, and I think the temptation has been to treat them as concept albums, but I think in general it's still just... John & co making the music they want to make? It's useful to have a theme, for the creative process, for marketing, for word of mouth, for merch... but I admit I bristle a bit at the time of actually trying to engage with the music if I've had too much of that put in my head in advance. And it certainly doesn't help that there's a killer run of albums up to 2012's underrated Transcendental Youth to compare them to.

In League With Dragons is "the Dungeons & Dragons album". It was suggested that it was a "partial rock opera" and it was announced on a Twitch stream hosted by Wizards of the Coast, publishers of D&D and Magic: the Gathering. It is, though, undeniably a Mountain Goats album, a pretty good one, and in a way Mountain Goats albums have had contrivances to them for even longer than 2015. It has the requisite lines that people will scream along to when they're at their most exhausted, in this case first and foremost "I'm gonna burn it all down today / and sweep all the ashes away" off of "Going Invisible 2". We even get hints with "Waylon Jennings Live" of where the full band's sound is headed as they begin to understand each other better and play more as a unit. This might be the last mainline album where "The Mountain Goats" means John Darnielle-- Getting Into Knives is where they truly become a band.

I think this album represented the moment that I clocked that John was truly settling in for the long haul, not calcifying but at least finding a way to turn this project into something that could support him, his family, his band. If I didn't know anything about the promotional cycle or considered it alongside the marketing for Beat the Champ or Goths maybe I wouldn't have even considered its theme as out-of-the-ordinary. This is a Mountain Goats-ass record, but as the third in a row whose announcement felt like there was some danger of every album being "the album about..." it definitely reshaped how I saw the work under this name. That they swerved away from that a bit comes as a bit of a relief, but I can't say it would have made me stop listening.