| First
in a series of three compilations of increasingly rare and difficult-to-track-down
Mountain Goats songs that first saw the light of day on a blur of 7"
EPs, cassettes, and compilation/fanzine appearances during the 1990s.
This was first issued on Ajax in 1999 and has been reissued by 3 Beads
of Sweat, praise the lord. The centerpieces of Protein Source
of the Future...Now! include:
-the Mountain Goats' first 7" for Ajax from 1993, the juicily lo-fi
Chile de Arbol, capturing John Darnielle at his scrappy,
impassioned best, including the stoic, Casio-cadenced "Going to Malibu"
and the whimsical history-lope "Billy the Kid's Dreams of the Magic
Shoes."
-the Philyra 7" EP, released on England's now defunct
Theme Park label in 1994, a power-packed quartet of songs that range from
the hooky minutiae-obsessed "Third Snow Song" to the left-field
crowd-pleaser "The Monkey Song" to the rocking, send-in-the-troops
strum of "Love Cuts the Strings" to the ephemeral yet ridiculous
Casio-backed "Pure Honey."
-the 8-song Yam, the King of Crops cassette from 1994,
released on the short-lived Oska label out of England, a wonderful orgy
of tape-hiss-laden agrarian folk, including the ironic Woody Guthrie homage
in "Seed Song," the psychedelic death-rattle of "Two Thousand
Seasons" (consisting of lyrics taken from Ayi Kwei Armah's book of
the same name), and the fever/food melding of "Yam, the King of Crops"
(which name-checks Pari Basmati rice and the nymph Galatea!).
Fleshing out the CD are plenty of other gems from the vaults, including
the visually evocative and lovely "Pure Heat," the slow-hand
strum-a-thon "Hand Ball" (taking its lyrical bulk from Chinua
Acheb's Things Fall Apart), an early song with the Bright
Mountain Choir in "The Window Song," and of course that song
with the reference to boiled peanuts in Cairo, Georgia, "Alpha Omega."
It's like dipping your toes into the running current throughout the centuries,
lo-fi indie-folk style. With 23 tracks in all, spanning 1993-1995 (perhaps
the most fertile period in the decade-plus history of the Mountain Goats),
this makes an excellent introduction to the pre-4AD-era 'Goats.
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