So Kiss Me With Your Mouth Open Turn the Tires Toward The Street (Pt.2 of 6)

mountain goats Originally uploaded by threw_a_spark. Part two of six in the ongoing CURRENT FAVORITE SONGS meme, a track weighing in at two minutes, ten seconds. It's the MOUNTAIN GOATS-DILAUDID. The album is supposed to be highly autobiographical, and John Darnielle is putting together this collage of thoughts and songs about his late abusive father. One of the more intensely disturbing thematic choices I've latched onto lately, and it doesn't help to be listening to it and suddenly hear lines like "And then I'm awake and I'm guarding my face/ hoping you don't break my stereo /because it's the one thing I couldn't live without/ so I think about that / and sorta black out." But enough about the album as a whole, that's not what I'm doing this for. Track Four is the one I've been obsessed with, ever since I heard him just start out "The reception's gotten fuzzy / the delicate balence has shifted/ Put on your gloves and your black pumps /Let's pretend the fog has lifted / Now you see me /Now you don't / Now you say you love me / Pretty soon you won't." He was standing onstage in the dark venue, and I was still sort of unclear on how good this whole thing was going to be, but then I was just breathless. On the actual studio recording, it opens with a thick grouping of strings, something unusual for the Goats, adding in that air of an almost soundtrack recording. His voice, though, feels the same as it's ever been. It's the catches in his speech that make the song for me, and how he's rhyming in small well-crafted ways. I'm not sure what or who it's about. I don't think his father, since the twice repeating chorus-like bit says "kiss me with your mouth open", but it's like, she's driving, I don't know, and they're pulling away from the curb and something violent and beautiful is falling to it's knees, and all the singer can do is insist that the moment be forged in some way that will enable him to hold it close in the upcoming days. The quiet bleak days, with scotch and a four-track. He talks about "hiking up your fishnets", he talks about taking your foot off the brake, and I know the song is too over the top to try and pretend it's something real and happening, but the way he escalates his voice at the end and just beseeches you, ah, it's a good line and a good song and you'll want to listen to it again even if it hurts. "All the chickens come home to roost/Plump bodies blotting out the sky/You know it breaks my heart in half/To see them try to fly/Cause you just can't do things your body wasn't meant to" DILAUDID (hydromorphone hydrochloride): (WARNING: May be habit forming), a hydrogenated ketone of morphine, is a narcotic analgesic.