I used to be a huge Mountain Goats fan. That is, I used to try to get hold of every cd, 7″ and tape that had at least one of their songs on it. Of which there were quite a few so in any case it was a nice way to pass time. I stopped following them a number of years ago, when it felt like the joke had stopped working for me. For, great as some of their songs might be, I always thought of them as some kind of inside joke, with all those references to places, mythical figures and other Mountain Goats songs. Also, since I am snobbish like that, I liked them better when their songs were still recorded in a lower-than-lo-fi way, through a dictaphone for instance.

Yesterday morning, I downloaded Sax Rohmer 1 from the Coast is Clear blog. It is a song off the forthcoming album Heretic Pride –out in February– and it’s really good in an old-Mountain Goats kind of way. I couldn’t stop listening to it this morning.