Just a guitar and a voice: the naked songs of The Mountain Goats

Note: Photos by Aaron Facemire.

That damn coffee machine was a nuisance.

I don't know what I was expecting, as Thursday's night's Mountain Goats and John Vanderslice concert was held in the Courtyard Cafe (ahem, a coffee shop), but every time it started working, the music was drowned out.

It didn't help that the show was all acoustic music. The struggle lasted any time a customer ordered a drink, they were glared at by either the performer or the audience (Vanderslice even stopped a song at one point to wait for the noise to end).

Distractions aside, the music in Urbana Thursday night was a mixed back. Vanderslice can write good enough melodies, but struggles with choruses. And The Mountain Goats (just John Darnielle this time) were great, but didn't play for long enough (apparently to a throat problem).

Vanderslice opened, and I'll be damned if I ever understood what he was singing about. His between-song banter was funny and engaging, but his lyrics were abstract to the point of being incomprehensible.

And yes, his melodies were good. They went somewhere, and they were colorful enough to keep me interested. But they never paid off, and the songs went nowhere (even the last song, which had audience members onstage clapping along, wasn't discernible from anything else he played).

When Darnielle took the stage, he went right into a cover of Tom Petty's "Free Fallin'." Sounding like it was a joke, it quickly turned into an plea for help and attention, much like the music he writes himself.

He then went straight into "Going to Bolivia," and from there it took off. For the 50-minute set, it was one song after another.

Darnielle's bare-bones approach served him well, and it highlighted the strange but straightforward lyrics he had. He is not the most technically proficient player, but his almost punky approach made up for it. He was passionate, and this helped him rise up beyond just being a man and his guitar.

And while Vanderslice struggled to make a song go somewhere, Darnielle's songs were short and to the point. Rivalled only by Robert Pollard (of Guided by Voices) in terms of output, he is able to churn out a large quantity of music, meaning they aren't all long. Unlike Pollard, however, he has an emotional attachment to these songs, revealing things he would never be comfortable just saying (he also has the uncanny ability to make cover personal, which he did again with Jay and the Americans' "This Magic Moment).

The audience was with him the entire time, almost eerily-so. When Darnielle played "Shadow Song," it was so quiet that it was distracting to hear my pen writing. When he played "No Children," the audience sang every word. It was a dedication I hadn't seen to a band in a long time, and it was great to see.

Darnielle's set ended too soon, and he could have played for much longer and still not lost any steam. In the end, they (and I) didn't care about the damn coffee machine, just the music. And we wanted more.

Notes: Photos by Aaron Facemire.

In addition, My updates done during the show on Twitter can be found here.