The Mountain Goats on 10/18

As previously mentioned, I am a slavish devotee of The Mountain Goats. To borrow from recent presidential debate speech, there's a fundamental difference between fans of TMG and non-fans (or even casual fans): the unaffected listeners hear a man with a funny voice, spazzy guitar and wordy, kind of pretentious lyrics, and the fans hear a quirky genius storyteller whose poetry and seeming simplicity present the trickiest parts of humanity laid bare. He is practically a messianic figure to those of us who get it, and we look pretty weird to the non-kooks on the sidelines.

I am, without a doubt, in the crazy-in-love camp, yet I still felt somewhat awkward when I arrived at the venue. In part this is because to be a Mountain Goats fan is to be awkward, and in part because I suspected that I was surrounded by people who out-obsessed me--I could tell they were better Darnielle fans than I was because of all the men had bushy beards, and skinny jeans and plaid button-down shirts were everywhere. Clearly there was a uniform and only the truest fans had received the memo. My suspicions were confirmed later, when I was seemingly the only one who couldn't sing along with every word of 'No Children,' the only one who failed to adequately prove their great love of The Mountain Goats! At least I could holler 'hail, Satan' along with the rest of the worshipping crowd.

After I attempted to drown my self-consciousness at the bar, Kaki King took the stage. I was unfamiliar with her before the show, but since Saturday I've been listening to her constantly. She played acoustic guitar more aggressively than anyone I've ever seen, slapping at the strings and giving the her spaced-out post-rock a sharper edge . Her acoustic-driven, often instrumental songs recalled wide-open Western landscapes, cowboys and bandits battling it out in the desert. I know I'll be listening to her the next time I drive through southern Utah and need a soundtrack for Highway 6.

I think John Darnielle might be the most charmingly awkward frontman I've ever seen. He's just a funny-looking-guy, for one thing, with a long bespectacled face that fits the odd stories he tells perfectly because it doesn't at all. He moves around the stage in a sort of disjointed way, kicking out his legs and stomping and generally moving like an excited Tin Man with not enough oil in his joints, but there's a tremendous joy in it. He was constantly grinning, even while singing some of the most tragic lines he's ever written.

The whole band had the same kind of unpolished, almost childish energy, and it gave each song the fuzzy fresh excited feeling that his early, low-fi recordings evoked, only with added intensity thanks to the extra instrumentation. Listening to Mountain Goats recordings a few days later, they all seem just slightly muted and held back. I guess this is always the consequence of seeing an artist who knows how to craft a live sound that's distinct from their studio one. If they really succeed, everything but their voice from the stage might seem like just an echo.