Beat The Champ

Description

The Mountain Goats is the name of a band that actually hides the name of a single individual: John Darnielle. Since his early recordings in the 90s and his songs composed with the Mountain Goats, Darnielle has continued to blend autobiographical narratives with stories of various characters, supported by folk-pop music that is sometimes inventive, sometimes bland, fading behind the lyrics, which are always worth paying attention to. Beat The Champ is the fifteenth (!) album by the Mountain Goats, thus adding a few more stories to the already substantial repertoire of the band. The album, right from the cover, immerses itself in the world of professional wrestling in the United States, particularly in the southern part of the country. The songs therefore talk about wrestlers battling each other, but also against their sometimes difficult lives, against age or melancholy. Rarely has the band ventured so far into the concept-album model. Here, Darnielle's childhood memories of wrestlers confront the real or imagined lives of these figures. The tracks oscillate between melancholic ballads before or after the fight, the athlete's doubts, their fears, and more energetic pieces, the fights themselves.