【搬运译】Pitchfork初评The Mountain Goats 2002年专辑 "All Hail West Texas

搬运自：网易云音乐专栏【Music Online Zine Courier】（在原文基础上添加了英语原文与排版调整）

翻译：豆目豆科

Remember 'audio cassettes'? Remember the days when the pre-digital Walkman was criticized as the most isolating and therefore masturbatory form of self-entertainment since the novel? Remember snickering about needing to buy 'head cleaner'? Remembering sacramentally disemboweling the "I Love You Forever: The Supermix" tape of a partner whose behavior later revealed that they were obviously disingenuous about the loving-you-forever thing? If only I had a turtleneck for every date that ended when, after showing me her new tattoo of the Chinese symbol for 'woman' that she still hid from Dad, the girl coyly asked what was in that big black trunk at the foot of my bed-- only to learn that it was full of releases from cassette-only labels. One even sneered, "I don't even know how to use a cassette," as if they were a worse misappropriation of plastic and the means of mass production than oversized "We're #1" hands for winless football teams.

还记得“盗录磁带”吗？还记得数字时代之前随身听盛行的日子吗？那个随身听尚被批评为自小说以来最聊以自慰、最“颓废”无用的自娱方式的时光吗？还记得曾对购买“磁带磁头清洁器”的人的不屑一笑吗？还记得只舍得在婚礼上“刨腹”取出播放的自制磁带吗？上面还会写着“I Love You Forever: the Supermix”的字样，最后仍会发觉在“爱你到永远”这件事上显然都是虚情假意。回想起当时的我我若穿着一件高领毛衣就好了，那次约会结束后，女孩瞒着她的父亲，来到我的房间给我看她的新纹身，是一个中文的“女人”，她还会腼腆地问我床边的黑色大箱子里装的是什么——最后悻悻得知里面装的都是磁带，那时那些厂牌都只发行磁带。总有人会对此嗤之以鼻，“我都不知道磁带该怎么用”，仿佛它们才是加重塑料污染和批量生产滥用的罪魁祸首，而不是那些脑残粉给从来没有过胜绩的球队做的超大“We're #1”应援板。

As big an oddball on the underground landscape as Stephin Merritt, Mountain Goat John Darnielle understands how to harness the majesty of the practically aborted cassette format. He appeared on nearly every cassette-only label's compilation during their golden era of Xerox-ed and Crayola-ed cover art, and released his band's first three proper albums of passionate nasal-fi straight to tape. A zillion vinyl releases and ten CDs later, and the Goats have offered the world what 'they' would have us believe is the highest-profile concept album ever recorded on a jambox, complete with grinding gears that sound like Darnielle rigged a stethoscope to the saliva glands of a retired android. And despite consistently featuring more hey's, la's and whoa's than Ringo Starr's spiral lyric notebook (hanging on the wall of the Hard Rock Cafe in Bent Musket, Georgia, if you want to check it out), Darnielle's yelled lyrics continue to pierce layers of the listener's inner ice. Foes of profane merriment beware: the chorus of "Jenny" employs a "hi-diddle-dee-dee-goddamn." Who else could, with only an abused acoustic guitar accompanying him, pull off a line as prosaic as, "We tried to fight the creeping sense of dread with temporal things"?

同Stephin Merritt一样，The Mountain Goats乐队的John Darnielle也是地下音乐界的一个大怪人，他知道怎样重新唤起几乎被废止的磁带的威严。他的身影几乎会出现在所有磁带厂牌发行的汇编中，在他们复印或涂鸦式封面艺术的黄金时代，甚至直接选择用磁带发行了他乐队的前三张激情澎湃的直录专辑。数百万张黑胶唱片和十张CD之后，The Mountain Goats乐队为世界带来了“他们”会让我们相信这是有史以来用干扰器录制出的最引人瞩目的概念专辑，听起来就像Darnielle把听诊器放在一个退役仿生人的“唾液腺”——相互摩擦打滑的生锈齿轮上。尽管Darnielle口中的“hey”,“la”和“whoa”比Ringo Starr的复读式歌词（如果你想看的话，还挂在乔治亚州Bent Musket的Hard Rock Cafe店的墙上）还要多，但Darnielle呐喊而出的歌词依旧足以穿透听众内心的冰层。亵渎欢乐的坏宝宝要小心了：“Jenny”的副歌里“hi-diddle-dee-dee-goddamn”，你能忍住不笑算我输。还有谁能用一把已经快要报废的木吉他写出像“We tried to fight the creeping sense of dread with temporal things”这样散文般的句子？

The songs here that aren't sagas of wayward youths chronicle the trajectories of various loves, from courtship, to feeding fruit to each other, to divorce and/or death, and sometimes even to hell. Which brings up "The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton," and its bold invocation of the Prince of Darkness: the marginalization of God cost rock one of its central components, which Darnielle resurrects with his emphatic envoy, "Hail Satan!" Though Darnielle palpably dissed Glenn Danzig in a recent issue of his zine Last Plane to Jakarta, moments like the chanting of "Hail Satan," that blend earnestness with clever condescension, provide clues to how Darnielle does his thing. He plays with tone, dipping sophistication in the muck of primitivity, sampling bits of Emily Du(i)ckinson, T.S. Eliot, and Philip Larkin in his home-taped, sentimental wimp-rock, involving just enough brain food to prevent that Scorsese-bred part of me from suggesting, "Ayy! I got some Clorox that'll get that heart off your sleeve."

专辑里的歌并非不羁青年的传奇故事，而记录着各样爱情的踪迹，从求爱、到互喂水果、到离异或是一方逝世，有时甚至来到地狱。“The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton”，在这首歌里他高呼黑暗王子撒旦的名号：对上帝的边缘化也是摇滚乐的核心组成部分之一，Darnielle的口号“Hail Satan!”让这一热忱复生。尽管Darnielle在他最近一期的杂志《Last Plane to Jakarta》中坚决地反对Glenn Danzig，但像“Hail Satan!”这样的吟唱，融合有真诚和巧思毫不生硬的高傲，为Darnielle如今最终呈现出的模样提供了线索。他玩弄语气，在原始泥沼中浸泡繁杂混乱，在他的自制磁带、多愁善感的“懦夫”摇滚中抽离出Emily Du(i)ckinson、T.S. Eliot和Philip Larkin的身影，充斥着磅礴的精神食粮，而这些有仅仅是为了防止我听信那个Martin Scorsese迷弟的哪怕一丁点建议，“Ayy! I got some Clorox that'll get that heart off your sleeve.”

Add "The Mess Inside," with its urgent account of a love that even a September jaunt to New York can't save, to the exponentially multiplying list of songs accidentally weighted with post-boxcutter connotations of homeland insecurity (as well as the lines in "Pink and Blue" about Oklahoman wind smelling like blood and smoke). After producing dozens of songs obsessed with mobility (the "Going To ________" songs), Darnielle's last three albums have been settled in one geographic region, hinting at a fusty patience or new maturity. Would you believe that "Blues In Dallas," a Hamlet-assed song with a tinny keyboard backup and JFK underpinnings, is about something as unsexy as deciding to wait, and is also really, really good?

“The Mess Inside”，其中所描绘的迫切爱情，即使赶在9月前去纽约也无法挽回，把它加到愈发冗长的歌曲列表中，无疑又加强了对美利坚安全与否的后BoxCutter式内涵（以及“Pink and Blue”中类似“俄克拉荷马州吹的风闻起来仿佛混杂着血与烟”的词）。在制作了几十首痴迷于流动性的歌曲（标题形如“Going To ________”的歌曲）后，Darnielle最后的三张专辑一直锚定同一个地理区域，好像他的耐心已经生锈，或是说他已经成熟。你会相信“Blues In Dallas”，这首哈姆雷特般的史诗歌曲，在尖锐的键盘伴奏和肯尼迪一样高傲的底气加持之下，却是关于“决定留下等待”这样毫不性感的事情，而且它又非常、非常的出色？

Darnielle's craft can convince you to follow his classist/nostalgic aesthetic logic: this album would sound perfect on the one-speaker radio atop a custodian's pushcart. You'll start asking, how can there be a sport so colonial that it requires as much cultivated land as golf does? Since so little gets reported anyway, what justifies the competing 24-hour news channels? Didn't 'analog' movie monsters at least take up three-dimensional space on the film, unlike the computer phantoms of Jurassic Park that leave actors running from thin air? Does every disc in my collection really have to be a performance test that justifies my investment in all of that stereo componentry?

Darnielle的手艺可以说服你听信他的那套古典/怀旧主义美学逻辑：这张专辑甚至在婴儿车的辣鸡收音机上都听起来很是完美。你会开始问，怎么会有一项运动如此殖民化，以至于需要像高尔夫球场那样多的耕地？既然报道的内容如此之少，又有什么理由让一天内各家新闻频道相互争得你死我活？不像《侏罗纪公园》中的后期特效那样让演员凭空奔跑，“模拟”电影中的怪物至少是三维空间实体吧？那么我收藏的每张碟片真的必须满足性能测试的需要？以证明我在所有立体声组件上的投资是合理的吗？

At least two songs on All Hail West Texas flagrantly bemoan the state-of-the-art burden of uncurbed, soul-charring consumption. But whether you embrace the hiss and crackle or not, Darnielle seems to be, like the poets he cites, settled in his spot on the fringe.

在《All Hail West Texas》中，至少有两首歌公然地对这种无节制、摧残灵魂的高消费，所谓先进、高级的负担报以鄙夷的目光。但不管你是否接受这种劈里啪啦，嘶嘶作响的底噪，Darnielle就像他引用的诗人一样，在角落中寻得自己的安身之所。