The Mountain Goats and Kaki King light up Seattle

October 20, 2008, at the Showbox

By Jonathan Shipley
Published: October 22nd, 2008 | 4:55pm

A girl stands on a stage. She’s got on a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt. Her hair is pulled back a little. It’s short. And she stands there with a guitar. The crowd murmurs as she becomes illuminated in lights. She plays. Virtuosity.

Kaki King and the Mountain Goats played at Seattle’s Showbox on October 20, a dark cold night, which they lit up with their musicianship. First on stage was King, who, at 29 years-old is one of the best guitarists playing today. See her slap and strum, knock and beat, make her instrument whisper and make it roar, have it sing like a choir of angels or like a Hell’s Angel after a weekend bender, and you’ll heartily agree. She can play and the thrumming crowd of hipsters, college kids, and even bald guys with beards took note.

King, who played with another guitarist and a drummer, showed her wide-ranging skill, from ethereal melodies, where her voice was as thin and delicate as a butterfly’s wing to guitar-mashing thunderclaps of sound. She played tracks her various albums, including her latest full-length Dreaming of Revenge (Velour) and my favorite, …Until We Felt Red (Velour), among others.

Talking to the audience from time to time about her last visit to Seattle (she had the flu) or about the apocalypse (“I don’t want to eat tinned peaches and then die”), she peppered the night with good, folksy humor and responded to fans who shouted how much they appreciated her. And she appreciated them too, as she played a raucous, angry thumping tune to close her set.

After a brief break, the Mountain Goats came to whoops and hollers. The same bald-headed men with beards cheered. A knot of young men in the front raised their arms with fists pumping, heads bobbing, and bodies jostling when frontman John Darnielle and his mates stepped on stage.

Darnielle — who has a voice one must get used to — is like the PC from those fun Mac ads, if the PC played guitar, was really energetic and sang songs with some amazing lyrics. In “Autoclave” he sang, “I dreamt that I was perched atop a throne of human skulls/On a cliff above the ocean, howling wind, and shrieking seagulls/And the dream went on forever — one single, static frame/Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name.” During “Horseradish Road” he sang, “The enigma variations on the radio/The things that I could guess at/The things that I already know/And the $12,000 that turned up in your purse/You’ve done something awful/I’ve done something worse.”

The crowd was happy with the tight sound of the trio, the energy of Darnielle, and so they sang, loud and strong, along with the band. And, a brief aside, not every lead singer of a rock band can, between numbers, summarize a Franz Kafka story and disparage Ace of Base in the same sentence. Kudos, Darnielle, kudos.

The Mountain Goats are a smart group, like The Decemberists (without the melodramatic storytelling) or The Barenaked Ladies (without the tongue-in-cheek lyrics), if they had gotten their Master’s degrees online.

King is touring with the Mountain Goats to tout their new vinyl EP, Black Pear Tree (Cadmean Dawn) and both groups did what they set out to do — play and play, and sweat and strum, and make sure the kids got their money’s worth — those same kids who like to disparage Ace of Base. Kudos, kids, kudos.