The bold, gory B-movie artwork already implies the cinematic relationship of the 21st studio album by the indie folk band, which was once founded solely by singer, guitarist and songwriter John Darnielle. After Darnielle holed up in native North Carolina in late 2020 and whiled away the time watching old action flicks, it’s no surprise that the album’s opener, “Training Montage,” dedicates itself to an 80’s archetypal compression technique. It’s just one of many secret hits the Mountain Goats have up their sleeve.
While the production supervised by Alicia Bognanno (Bully) sometimes comes close to Killers, the band nevertheless distances itself from their wide-screen seriousness, for example by teasingly deducing “John Rambo never went to Vietnam” in the sloshing “First Blood”. or met with a subtle wink on the US highway panoramic perspective on the Tom Petty-esque Incandescent Ruins. BLEED OUT may not be a continuous cinematic concept album, but its musical airiness – despite all the sometimes heavy artillery in terms of content – cannot deny certain parallels to a short film evening in an open-air cinema.
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