The Mountain Goats with Stephen Brodsky at First Ave, Minneapolis, 4/19/15

Stephen Brodsky and John Darnielle cover Guns'n'Roses

Stephen Brodsky opened. I liked his voice and his guitar style -- lots of distortion and low end, played on an acoustic guitar. He played a lot of covers, though. Songs by Neil Young, Willie Nelson, PJ Harvey, and others. A few songs by an old band of his, too. He seemed to have a large repertoire, but wasn't playing it all. I think maybe he had collaborators who didn't want him to play their catalog on a solo tour. I may check out  his recordings and find out if his own music is as good as his covers. John Darnielle came out and played a Guns'n'Roses tune with him, but it wasn't planned or rehearsed
and they weren't consistently in the right key. It was delightful all the same.

John Darnielle never disappoints me. I'd seen him twice before, unless you count the time I was stuck in the entrance line to Austin City Limits and had to listen to his show drifting across the festival grounds and over the fence. That was truly a low point in my concertgoing life.

The Mountain Goats' catalog is absurdly large. I own 51 albums (including EPs) by John Darnielle/The Mountain Goats. I do not own them all.

JD is prolific, and he writes and plays music because it makes him happy. You can tell when he's on stage. He is utterly un-preoccupied with being cool when he's up there. He is grinning ear to ear. He says "thank you" after every song. He gushed about filling First Ave with fans, after initially scheduling a smaller venue, the Cedar Cultural Center. "When we decided to move the show from the Cedar, I said, okay, but what if that was all the people who wanted to come? So, really, thank you from the bottom of my heart." What a humble dude.

Anyway, making a setlist to play for a couple hours when you have written as many songs as JD has must be a pretty daunting task. He is generally totally willing to drop everything and take re

Mountain Goats!

quests. Once, I heard him explain on show that the last truly rock'n'roll thing about the music industry was spontaneousness at shows, and that anyone with a really rigid setlist is Doing It Wrong. I like his style.

It turns out there's a really high variance in the way I feel about any given song of his, though. They tend to be grouped into two categories. In the first category are a bunch of songs that I hear and think, "That was an interesting story, but I didn't dig the musical accompaniment." In the second category are songs I listen to on repeat. The best predictor of which category a song will fall into is which instrument JD plays during it. If it's a guitar, chances are I'll love it (category II). If it's a keyboard, chances are I'll be kind of lukewarm (category I).

He played a lot of stuff from his new record, Beat the Champ, which is all about professional wrestling. JD is the only one who could make that not feel too terribly gimmicky. He's written some category II songs with this record -- The Legend of Chavo Guerrero and Foreign Object to name names. Both of those songs made the setlist. The show opened with a recording of a professional wrestling monologue -- if you've ever watched professional wrestling, you can imagine the kind of thing I'm talking about.

The band started with Stabbed to Death outside San Juan, which is a really slow number to open a show with, then kicked it up a notch with a crowd favorite from an older record, Cry for Judas.

It was a solid set. By the time they got to Love Love Love and Up the Wolves, the crowd what you might call exuberant. The energy was among the best I've seen since moving to Minneapolis, certainly.

JD killing it.

The set ended, and I was surprised that the encore didn't include This Year -- but it did include The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton (featuring Stephen Brodsky), which is an incredibly experience in a crowd of that kind. JD introduced it in a surprising way, which was initially off-putting to me. "This song is about loving God with your whole heart," he said. "A lot of people don't know that's what it's about, but the feeling we get when we listen to music we like is something precious. And anyone who tries to take that away from you is playing for the wrong team." Minutes later, everyone in the venue is shouting "Hail Satan!" If anyone is doing religion right, it's JD.

I would have been happy to end it there, but they came out for a second encore and obliged me by playing This Year and No Children, also rambunctious tunes. The night ended with Spent Gladiator II.

Afterward, I went to buy a t-shirt...and JD came out to sign autographs. I had him sign a vinyl copy of Heretic Pride, told him I'd seen him play in Denton a few years back. That was the show where he pushed his glasses into my face to get me to put my camera down. He said he remembered the show, that it had been hot as hell in there. (Hail Satan.)

Setlist:

Stabbed to Death outside San Juan+
Cry for Judas
Animal Mask+
Foreign Object+
Get Lonely
Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod?
Heel Turn 2+
Black Pear Tree
*mystery song from Kimya Dawson collaboration* (Walk Like Thunder?)
Song for Black Sabbath's Second North American Tour
Woke Up New
Never Quite Free
Southwestern Territory+
Luna
Love Love Love
Up the Wolves
Game Shows Touch Our Lives
Amy (aka Spent Gladiator I)
__

The Legend of Chavo Guerrero+
The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton
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This Year
No Children
Spent Gladiator II

+Songs from Beat the Champ marked with a plus.