I made it through town somehow, but who's gonna save me now?

I'm juggling multiple comics-related pieces (and for multiple mediums!), but in the meantime I thought I'd link to a bunch of recent music criticism I wrote for EYE WEEKLY:

Vampire Weekend live review

ditto for Super Furry Animals + Times New Viking

Mahjongg - Kontpab

No Kids - Come Into My House

The Mountain Goats - Heretic Pride

The Mountain Goats review was understandably edited due to my interminable rambling about how great it is. There will probably be more of that to come on this blog, but for now here's my original version of that review:

Fanatical Mountain Goats followers (perhaps the only kind) have disagreed on John Darnielle’s move away from no-fi boombox recording, a few regarding the recent use of a band and actual studio as apostasy. Well, they’re wrong. Heretic Pride is a metal album in spirit, and that calls for some excess. The extra instrumentation marshaled by producer John Vanderslice (even backup singers!) girds Darnielle’s poetic lyrics with new weight and drive, so that his anthems for nihilistic losers and harried outcasts are more urgent still. His pulpy influences are obvious: there’s the tiniest, moving crack in that voice as the wonderful “San Bernardino” ends, but it begins over gentle guitar picking with lyrics like “Flaming swords may guard the garden of Eden/But we consulted maps from earlier days,” “Lovecraft in Brooklyn” understands that the incomprehensible horrors its namesake conjured up were born from a fear of human intimacy the song’s protagonist shares. There is cancerous self-hatred too: the narrator of “Autoclave,” the most danceable Goats track yet, mutters “no emotion that’s worth having could call my heart its home.” Triumphant defiance is the main obsession, however, and "Heretic Pride" celebrates it best: burning at the stake, the title track’s heathen yells “I feel so proud to be alive/And I feel so proud when the reckoning arrives,” Even at the mouth of hell, Darnielle throws up the horns.