

[photo by Megan Etzel]

All the stars aligned for this Sunday night return to NYC for the Mountain Goats. On tour in support of their newest release, the excellent Goths (Merge Records) album, the band played their first local shows in over a year and a half. Those legendary 2015 and 2016 City Winery shows saw the Mountain Goats in an intimate setting, but at Brooklyn Steel this weekend the large room afforded the band the opportunity to stretch out. As they took the stage to the dramatic Vivaldi concerto, the Mountain Goats were greeted warmly by the packed room. This was a night when the fans played a truly complimentary role to the music — hushed during the quiet moments and raucous when required, but attentive throughout. There was no idle chatter and virtually none of the persistent shouted requests that sometimes annoy at Mountain Goats shows. Ultimately, the audience was rewarded with a lengthy show featuring stellar performances, a few rare nuggets, and two shout-outs to the crowd from John Darnielle later in the evening.

Goths is essentially a tribute to that early 80s British scene which included Siouxsie, Nick Cave, Peter Murphy/Bauhaus, and Andrew Eldritch/Sisters of Mercy. As with any subject of a Mountain Goats album, the songs are both tributes and explications of the melancholy and loneliness of the lifestyle. “Andrew Eldritch Is Moving Back to Leeds” finds the singer leaving the goth life in Germany and returning with little or no fanfare to the upper Midlands town where the band began. For this particular show “Eldritch” was preceded by the debut of a cover of the Sisters Of Mercy’s 1989 single “Lucretia My Reflection”, performed to perfection in large part because the band’s stage assistant had enough foresight to print and laminate the lyrics in advance. It was that kind of night, as seemingly everything the band did turned out right. John’s three-song solo set featured an infrequent appearance of “Autoclave”, and an exceedingly rare unreleased “Poltergeist”, before the band returned for a powerful second half of the show. The show’s finale was a return of “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton”, a fun song that I haven’t seen in a few years and which always gets the crowd involved. Sunday night’s show at Brooklyn Steel represented all of the reasons why we keep coming back to see this band, and probably always will.

I recorded this set with the Neumann hypers mounted high inside the soundboard cage and mixed with the a feed provided by the Mountain Goats longtime FOH Brandon Eggleston. Both the room and the feed provided superbly balanced sound, so that this recording is truly a remarkable capture. Enjoy!

Download the Complete Show [MP3] / [FLAC]

Stream the Complete Show:



Mountain Goats

2017-11-12

Brooklyn Steel

Brooklyn NY

Digital Master Recording

Soundboard + Audience Matrix

Soundboard [Engineer: Brandon Eggleston] + Neumann KM-150s > Sound Devices 744t > 2 x 24bit 48kHz wav files > Soundforge (post-production) > CDWave 1.95 (tracking) > TLH > flac (320 MP3 and tagging via Foobar)

Recorded and Produced by nyctaper

Setlist:

[Total Time 1:39:36]

01 [Vivaldi introduction]

02 The Grey King and the Silver Flame Attunement

03 Cotton

04 In the Craters on the Moon

05 Until I Am Whole

06 [banter – Bat Cave]

07 Rain in Soho

08 Lucretia My Reflection [Sisters Of Mercy]

09 Andrew Eldritch Is Moving Back to Leeds

10 [tuning]

11 Autoclave

12 Moon Over Goldsboro

13 Poltergeist

14 Snow Crush Killing Song

15 [banter – Fenders]

16 Paid in Cocaine

17 [banter – Shelved intro]

18 Shelved

19 The Young Thousands

20 Harlem Roulette

21 Against Pollution

22 [encore break]

23 Southwestern Territory

24 Up the Wolves

25 This Year

26 [second encore break]

27 Spent Gladiator 2

28 The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton

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