Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
(1) If you’ve listened to the Mountain Goats, you’ve probably had your head knocked by the hugely good words that John Darnielle writes. Seriously, if he wasn’t a complete word wizard that band would be like the sad Barenaked Ladies. He’s also good at blogging, and right now at his music blog Last Plane to Jakarta he’s working on a project called Thirty Poems About My Favorite Black Metal Band, which is exactly what it says it is. The band is Drastus, and they’re French.
So watching these guys work one chunk of music over like that is kinda rad. It’s like the music writing equivalent of like the Slow Food movement. It would be interesting to see this turn into a trend. (Possible downside: Pitchfork writers and would-be Pitchfork writers crank out Pynchon-length exegeses and the resulting pile of words that make no sense next to one another crashes the Internet.)
