VIDEO: Mountain Goats perform new material at MFA

Published Mar 23 2008, 03:26 AM by Carly Carioli

Mountain Goats, "Sign of the Crow (Live at the Museum of Fine Arts)

Mountain Goats, "Ain't Living Long Like This (Rodney Crowell cover, Live at the Museum of Fine Arts)

Mountain Goats, "Heretic Pride (Live at the Museum of Fine Arts)"

Mountain Goats w/ the Moaners
Live at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston
March 14, 2008

Moaners: two gals from Chapel Hill doing it Doo Rag style. Totally face-melting. We forgot how much we used to love bottleneck-slide-guitar-Fred McDowell-style punk rawk. For a couple years in the '90s there were like dozens of bands like this crawling around Memphis. Fuck. There is a conspicuous lack of mp3s or video of these ladies hanging around the internet. Unfortunately, we will not be adding to the record on that count. Maybe some other time.

However: we got some exclusive, new Mountain Goats stuff. At top: "Sign of the Crow," a great this-generation-is-fucked song that John Darnielle says he wrote three weeks ago in a hotel room in Alaska. Below that: "Ain't Living Long Like This" a Rodney Crowell blues that Darnielle got a hankering to play while hanging out in the dressing room, despite the fact that he'd never played it live before. At bottom: the full-band MTNGTS powers through the title track from their new "Heretic Pride."

We were thinking about the sudden appearance of that Crowell tune a few days after this show, when Darnielle announced he was cancelling an upcoming Australian tour for unspecified "personal medical reasons": "If it weren't serious, I would be leaving for Oz next week, believe me," he wrote on the Mountain Goats site. "You'll be doing me a great favor if you keep me in your thoughts and prayers, and if you know in your heart that I don't play around in doing right by the people I love: I will be back to make this up to you." Aussies, hope the above will whet your appetite for the time being.