"Damn These Vampires" by the Mountain Goats from the album All Eternals Deck. 2011.
There's two ways to interpret this one. The literal vampires, with the blood-sucking and night-stalking. Or anything else, symbolically. The first tells a tale of ageless creatures trekking across the horses and trans-ams of time, trying to remember their humanity (or the evil demons attacking throughout history, however your take on sympathetics fall). The second option has bridged topics from drug addiction to fair-weather friends in its perceived fantastical metaphors. My take? The tactfully crafted lyrics, open-ended in annotative scope, blend so harmoniously with the music they must have been smithed in partnership at the forge.
I only want to point out the long drives in short phrases that really cement the song for me. The lines that close the verses, though quite bland in everyday language, spark anew with their auditory twins in the instrumentation. "Let this whole town hear your knuckles crack"; "someday we won't remember this"; "barely worth remembering"; and "someday we'll try to walk upright" achieve this absolute finality only when sung in accompaniment with the backing track. That depth added solely by notes and rhythms is what aces the song. All my flowery word conjuring aside: it doesn't sound like the band wrote the lyrics then found chord progressions, or crammed sentences into a melody over a prerecorded instrumental. This song sounds as if the two were hand-by-hand drafted, and no rhythm or word or measure or pitch seems forced or out-of-place. That's all the description I want to give of this number and recommend you listen along to the lyrics to arrive at your own interpretation. Annd, pardon my odd-speak for this one, it's latelatenight and I am tiredtired..tired. Times like this almost make Newspeak wished for, at least for clarity's sake. Err... doubleplusgood's sake.
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