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Mar 04, 2019 By Christopher Roberts The Mountain Goats

The Mountain Goats are releasing a new album, In League With Dragons, on April 26 via Merge. Previously they shared its first single, “Younger” (which was one of our Songs of the Week). Now they have shared another song from it, “Cadaver Sniffing Dog.” Listen below, followed by the band’s upcoming tour dates.

The band’s John Darnielle had this to say about the song in a press release:

“My records indicate that I wrote ‘Cadaver Sniffing Dog’ on Christmas Day, 2017, which probably tells you more about me than the song itself could ever hope to. I’d had the title in a notebook for several years, and had made a run or two at it, but Christmas lights and early sunsets seem to have put me in the right frame of mind to rise to the challenge of writing something morbid enough to live up to the name. Because I’m me, and favor sharp contrast, I went with something uptempo instead of, you know, a dirge.

“The acoustic guitars (Matt Douglas and I playing together in the same isolation room), bass, and drums are live in the studio; the lead vocal may also have been tracked on that same take, I forget; the downtown-New-York-by-way-of-Berlin guitar solo is Thom Gill. The strings are arranged by producer Owen Pallett and performed by the Macedonian Radio Symphonic Orchestra, conducted by Oleg Kondratenko. The backing vocals are arranged by Robert Bailey and sung by himself, Everett Drake, Jason Eskridge, and Michael Mishaw, with whom we also worked on the Gothsalbum; it’s a profound honor to me to have Robert and the guys take a song and just elevate it, transport it, make it cosmic. Matt Ross-Spang engineered it and Shani Gandhi mixed it; they are actual wizards.

“The lyric is a noir vision of a crime scene investigation, and is a metaphor for a relationship in which there is nothing whatsoever left to salvage, because, as I mentioned earlier, it was Christmas, and, being the sort of person who really tries to get into the Christmas spirit, I—well, anyway, please enjoy ‘Cadaver Sniffing Dog.’”

In League With Dragons follows 2017’s Goths and 2015’s wrestling-themed Beat the Champ. Frontman John Darnielle wrote all the songs. The Mountain Goats (songwriter and guitarist Darnielle, drummer Jon Wurster, bassist Peter Hughes, and multi-instrumentalist Matt Douglas) recorded the album at Blackbird Studios in Nashville, TN. Matt Ross-Spang (Margo Price, Jason Isbell, John Prine) engineered the album, which also features additional vocal arrangements from Robert Bailey and strings performed by the Macedonian Radio Symphonic Orchestra.

Darnielle had this to say about the album in a previous press release: “This album began life as a rock opera about a besieged seaside community called Riversend ruled by a benevolent wizard, for which some five to seven songs were written. When I’m focusing on a project, I always distract myself from the through-line with multiple byways, which are kind of like mini-games within the broader architecture of a long video game. As I worked on the Riversend stuff, weird noir visions started creeping in, probably under the influence of Leonardo Sciascia (a Sicilian author, he wrote mysteries) and Ross MacDonald’s The Zebra-Striped Hearse, which a friend from Port Washington gave me while I was in the thick of the writing. I thought these moods helped complicate the wizards and dragons a little, and, as I thought about my wizard, his health failing, the invasion by sea almost certain to wipe out half his people, I thought about what such a person might look like in the real world: watching a country show at a Midwestern casino, or tryout pitching for an American League team years after having lit up the marquees. Finally, I wrote the title track, which felt like a drawing-together of the themes in play: rebellion against irresistible tides, the lush vistas of decay, necessary alliances. I am earnestly hoping that a new genre called ‘dragon noir’ will spring from the forehead of nearly two years’ work on these songs, but, if not, I am content for this to be the sole example of the style.”

The Mountain Goats Tour Dates:

4/26 - 9:30 - Washington, D.C. (SOLD OUT)
4/27 - Dogfish Head - Milton, DE (SOLD OUT)
4/28 - The Wilbur Theater - Boston, MA (SOLD OUT)
4/30 - Brooklyn Steel - Brooklyn, NY
5/1 - White Eagle Hall - Jersey City, NJ
5/3 - L’Astral - Montreal, QB
5/4 - Bronson Centre - Ottawa, ON
5/5 - Phoenix - Toronto, ON
5/7 - Mr Smalls - Pittsburgh, PA
5/8 - Mr Smalls - Pittsburgh, PA
5/9 - Woodward Theater - Cincinnati, OH
5/10 - Cannery - Nashville, TN
5/11 - 1884 Lounge - Memphis, TN
5/13 - Buskirk Chumley - Bloomington, IN
5/14 - Majestic Theatre - Madison, WI
5/15 - Thalia Hall - Chicago, IL
5/16 - Thalia Hall - Chicago, IL
5/17 - First Avenue - Minneapolis, MN
8/28 - Metro Music Hall - Salt Lake City, UT
8/29 - Pink Garter - Jackson, WY
8/30 - Pub Station - Billings, MT
8/31 - Top Hat Lounge - Missoula, MT
9/1 - The Bing Crosby Theater - Spokane, WA
9/4 - The Showbox -Seattle, WA
9/5 - Neumos - Seattle, WA
9/6 - Imperial Vancouver - Vancouver, BC
9/7 - McDonald Theatre - Eugene, OR
9/9 - Crystal Ballroom - Portland, OR
9/10 - Aladdin - Portland, OR
9/12 - The Fillmore - San Francisco, CA
9/13 - The Fillmore - San Francisco, CA
9/14 - Belasco Theater - Los Angeles, CA
9/16 - House of Blues - Anaheim, CA
9/17 - House of Blues - San Diego, CA
9/18 - Brooklyn Bowl - Las Vegas, NV

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