Some regrets, no apologies.

I'm blogging on The Mountain Goats' new album All Eternals Deck until I feel like stopping.

So there's that verse in Tom Petty's "Free Fallin'," where he sings about the valley vampires moving West on Ventura boulevard, which strikes me as the touch that made the song better than a proto-"Meet Virginia" listing of quirks and failures between some guy and girl. A few layovers in LAX aside, I've never spent any time in Los Angeles, but "Free Fallin'" more or less defines it in my imagination: a harsh reception for hopeful innocents, some regrets, no apologies, and no particular depth.



And so I'm not sure if John Darnielle had any particular geographic setting in mind for "Damn These Vampires," the opening track on All Eternals Deck, but its muscle-car-in-a-Western imagery reminds me of the vampiric Los Angeles I pieced together from Tom Petty and, later, Joss Whedon. The press materials for All Eternals Deck describe it as a sort of cartography of hope and despair, and the opening song on the album hits a really unusual admixture of the two: the narrator's fighting his way forward, for no great reason, in a terrible and destructive life someone else has put him in:

feast like pagans, never get enough
sleep like dead men, wake up like dead men
and when the sun comes try not to hate the light
someday we'll try to walk upright

crawl till dawn on my hands and knees
god damn these bite marks
deep in my arteries

crawl till dawn on my hands and knees
god damn these vampires
for what they've done to me

It's a great opening track for this album.