Time Capsule: The Mountain Goats, Zopilote Machine

Zopilote Machine arrived with little fanfare, its 19 tracks of raw acoustic performances and narrative sophistication standing in stark defiance of contemporary production trends, from the glossy pop of Mariah Carey’s Music Box to even the Steve Albini-helmed rock sheen of In Utero. No bass, no drums, no electric guitar—just Darnielle’s fervent strumming and vehement vocals averaging a brief two minutes per track. But the album’s lean aesthetic wasn’t so much the consequence of limited means as it was a deliberate artistic choice: “I don’t like production that makes the fact that [the song] is a made thing disappear,” Darnielle said in a 1994 interview. Music doesn’t magically apparate into being; it is painstakingly, meticulously built or furiously, rapidly invented in a whirlwind of creativity, and that’s as much the point of these early songs as their actual narratives are. “Part of what I’m doing as the Mountain Goats,” he continued, “is the aesthetic approach.”

Although this approach to songwriting and, most of all, production has greatly shifted in the decades since Zopilote’s release (when asked in that same ‘94 interview if the Mountain Goats would “ever work in a regular studio,” Darnielle replied “In a word, no”—meanwhile, nearly all of the Mountain Goats’ releases since the band’s 2002 masterwork Tallahassee have been recorded in a studio), the zeal with which Darnielle approaches his craft certainly hasn’t. Later albums have seen transitions into more complicated song structures and complex instrumentation, but back in those early days, the song was just the medium through which the story was told—early Mountain Goats material was all zeal and narrative, with little emphasis on technical prowess, or even (as some detractors might insist) adequacy. But to weirdos whose favorite singers can’t sing (to be fair, Darnielle can sing, I am just legally obligated to reference David Berman whenever possible), whose favorite songs are unpolished and strange—weirdos like me—Zopilote Machine is catnip.

What’s remarkable about Zopilote Machine, especially when viewed through the lens of the three decades that followed it, is how the album manages to feel both entirely of its moment and somehow outside of time altogether. While contemporary releases were chasing the sonic possibilities of modern recording technology, Darnielle was deliberately working with tools that were already considered primitive. The Panasonic boombox wasn’t just a necessity; it was an aesthetic choice that aligned perfectly with the album’s themes of limitation, desperation and what beauty may emerge from constraint. The album’s title itself speaks to this duality. A zopilote—the Mexican-Spanish word for “vulture”—is a creature that transforms death into sustenance, that finds life in endings. It’s an apt metaphor for an album that repeatedly turns moments of crisis into opportunities for revelation. Throughout these 19 tracks, relationships collapse, mythological figures are born and die, and characters face moments of terrible clarity, all captured with the kind of fidelity that makes it sound like you’re eavesdropping on someone’s most private moments.

But when I say the songs on Zopilote Machine are rough around the edges, I don’t mean that they merely sound raw and scratchy. I mean that they literally feel as if they were written moments prior to Darnielle turning on his boombox and starting to record—which is, of course, because they were. According to Darnielle himself, the vast majority of songs from this era of the Mountain Goats were recorded only minutes after they were penned: “I probably did a few takes until I got what I liked, but you’re hearing something closer to the heat of composition than you can hear in any framework except improvised music. All of these, you’re hearing them within seconds of their composition,” he said.

Perhaps because of this process, Zopilote Machine feels as if it’s being propelled forward by a sort of manic urgency, the emotional stakes of each song driven higher from underneath the heft of the lyrics. The tape hiss becomes as much a character as the Bright Mountain Choir’s spectral harmonies. There’s a second story beneath the 19 individual narratives on Zopilote Machine, and it’s a story of creation: You can hear the artist at work, feel the discrepancy between the oddball, miserable characters making up the Mountain Goats’ universe and the brilliant, fervidly creative mind behind them. It forces the listener to develop this weird kind of secondary meta-awareness—as evocative and visceral as the songs are, and as easy as it is to get wholly enveloped in the fleshed-out emotional and physical worlds Darnielle lays out for us, that constant undertone of the tape buzz is a perpetual reminder that we are listening to art as it is being created, listening to the act of that creation itself.

But as effortless as this double effort might seem to us as listeners, it was anything but unintentional. As Darnielle told Consequence of Sound in 2022, “old Mountain Goats songs often seem to be chasing their own inspiration in the moment. Now, that involves some craft in actually doing and it doesn’t mean it’s being written on the fly. But the thing you’re trying to sell when you track it is that it sounds like it’s just spontaneously coming into being.” Zopilote adheres to this approach to song-writing, which Darnielle described as being, basically, about “get[ting] in and get[ting] out” to CoS, almost religiously—Darnielle gets in, writes the songs, records them and gets out. The songs themselves function similarly, all of them blunt and without frills, instrumental breaks, or even bridges.

Every song is much the same: some violent strumming, Darnielle’s tell-tale warble, and the construction of an entire world in around two minutes or less—because, even from within these austere parameters, Darnielle (who, notably, has become an acclaimed author in recent years, with three lauded novels since 2014 alone) manages to create far more compelling narratives than most artists could hope to come up with. Populated by mythological figures, vengeful mothers, real-world locales and the first appearance of the now-legendary Alpha Couple—whose doomed relationship would haunt the Mountain Goats’ discography for years to come—Zopilote Machine is a book of short stories (ranging in genre from Southern gothic to Aztec folktale) put to music, each more evocative than the last.

Take the opening track, “Alpha Incipiens,” which introduces you to Zopilote Machine by way of a breakneck burst of relentless strummed acoustics—a lo-fi crackle reminder of the song as a “made thing”—and Darnielle’s signature nasal tenor embodying the narrator entirely, voice dripping with barely-concealed anger. Every single line paints a devastating picture of not only the song’s tangible setting (how many songs name-drop low air pressure systems?), but its emotional landscape. The opening couplet alone is a masterclass in songwriting: “The morning comes to a stuttering halt / The cool breeze that blows is somebody’s fault.” These are the first brushstrokes in what would become the Mountain Goats’ most enduring narrative portrait—that of the Alpha Couple. Their narrative eventually culminates on Tallahassee, the 2002 tour de force that is one of approximately two things that makes me feel proud to be from my hometown of Tallahassee, Florida (the other being T Pain, specifically because I learned recently that the “T” in T Pain literally stands for Tallahassee, and I think that is just incredible)—but this is their beginning, their incipiens (which is, of course, Latin for “beginning”). This is the Alpha Couple in their embryonic form—the first stitches in a years-long tapestry made up of vignettes and minute details, weather patterns and morning glories climbing walls.

After a subdued, apocalyptic interlude in the form of “Azo Tle Nelli in Tlaltipac?,” the record’s longest song (it’s only three minutes), we get even more backstory about the Alpha couple. “You say again that nothing’s wrong,” Darnielle sings over a simple chord progression in “Alpha Sun Hat.” “I’d really like to play along.” But there are buzzards in the guava tree, and the music you hear is not music but the devil, and the Tallahassee sun is not a sun but a human heart. As the album’s final Alpha Couple track, “Alpha in Tauris,” puts it: “The moment’s sweet, but it’s all wrong.”

The Alpha Couple are far from the only persistent motif featured on Zopilote Machine; according to the unofficial Mountain Goats fan Bible, the Annotated Mountain Goats site, there are no less than six song series that make an appearance on the record. For instance, the album’s twin tracks “Orange Ball of Love” and “Orange Ball of Hate” —the latter of which doubles as an unofficial Alpha Couple song—crop up towards the middle of the record,. They’re an undeniable pair despite their vastly different narratives (even beyond the titles, both songs begin most verses with “when,” the word feeling a little like an informal anaphora).

“Love” is a delightfully odd love song that feels, more than anything else, like an excerpt of a novel that leaves you desperate to read the rest—if only so you can find out just what the hell the context is. “I know that you’re wearing a wire,” Darnielle hums, “but as the sun becomes a blazing orange ball of fire, / I lose interest in this and other such inconsequential questions.” I mean, hello? Is this a spy love story?! “I know you’ll be turning me in / But I also know your real name’s not Amy Lynn / I see you look at me and figure out what I know about you / Well I’m not telling / I’m not telling you anything”?! That being said, as much as I’d love to watch an entire film about this song (and I would), I don’t need anything more. Darnielle doesn’t need to tell me anything. It’s beautiful and bite-sized, a perfect morsel of narrative that manages to simultaneously satiate and leave you wanting more. But Darnielle has always had a gift for weaponizing brevity—where other songwriters might stretch a moment into a sprawling six verses, he distills it into its most volatile, visceral form.

This talent for concision is evident in “Hate” as well, which somehow condenses years of resentment, regret and unspoken turmoil into just over a minute and a half. In the course of the first seven lines, we’re given the setting, the events occurring within it, the people experiencing said events and an interaction between them that immediately lays bare the nature of the oscillating, confused emotional battlefield between them, all over the same rapidly strummed chord progression. When Darnielle repeats, “I sure do love you,” it feels at once earnest and sarcastic—like a representation of some internal warring inside the narrator in which both sides keep losing. You have rocks in your brain, I sure do love you. I don’t want to live here anymore, I pull you in for a kiss. Undeniably, the love depicted in “Hate” is headed towards a crash-course collision, and undeniably, both parties know that. Even so, some odd combination of pride, determination, and desperation keeps them “holding on,” to quote the refrain in “Alpha Incipiens.”

As Darnielle once put it, “Hate” is “about that moment in which you know it’s not going to get any better, but you’re going to prove to somebody just exactly how strong you are.” This show of strength is both a promise and a threat, an act of protectiveness and an act of spite, and Darnielle ensures both come across in equal measure. After all, there’s a sweetness in the old adage about the captain going down with their ship, but there’s a cruel, stubborn possessiveness in it too: they go down with the ship precisely because it is their ship to go down with, and somehow losing that would be worse than losing everything (and, fittingly, this is the entire narrative arc of the Alpha Couple centered Tallahassee).

No Zopilote Machine narrator is as adamant about going down with the ship as the speaker of “Going to Georgia”—and while the song is from his point of view, make no mistake: We are not to see him as the protagonist. But despite its complicated legacy, “Going to Georgia” still arrives like a punch to the solar plexus whenever I hear it. Darnielle has since repudiated the fan favorite, saying, “I can’t really reconcile how buoyant it is with how much I dislike its narrator.” He wishes he had instead written it less misogynistically, from the perspective of the victim rather than the abuser. But I still feel (perhaps controversially) that the song possibly holds up better than he gives it credit for—because, in the minds of most abusers, what they are doing is not abuse.

That’s the part that always haunts me most, the ease with which they justify their actions to themselves. I’ve always disliked stereotypically “evil” portrayals of abusers in media for precisely that reason; if those are the signs you’re looking for to determine if you’re experiencing abuse (or if you are abusive yourself), you likely won’t find traces of them in reality. An unstable, violent ex-partner who shows up on your doorstep with a gun is probably not thinking “evil” thoughts; they’re thinking, “The most remarkable thing about you standing in the doorway is that it’s you / And that you’re standing in the doorway,” and that’s possibly the most disturbing thing of all. I don’t think of “Going to Georgia” as a love song, because it isn’t—it’s a horror story, and it’s closer to home than many we see onscreen.

Darnielle’s voice cracks and soars as he bleeds through the lines “And you smile as you ease the gun from my hand and I’m frozen with joy, right where I stand.” The tonal disconnect between those words (and the brightness with which they’re sung) and the actions actually taken by the narrator emphasizes, rather than diminishes the nausea I feel when I think about the song’s contents. While perhaps Darnielle’s discomfort stems from that not having been his intention, the meaning of a work of art is never limited strictly to the intent of its creator.

So, even if “Going to Georgia” was not written with that critique of the abuser in mind, that doesn’t change the fact that it lives inside the song itself. However, the case may also be that the song grew so popular that it escaped containment and was set loose into the broader world of…let’s call it “relaxed media literacy.” Perhaps Darnielle has been on the receiving end of audiences treating “Going to Georgia” like the love song it appears to be at face value, and maybe he grew justifiably uncomfortable when fans cheered about an abusive man pointing a gun at his ex at Mountain Goats concerts. But whatever the case, this is my review, so I get to talk at length about why I still like this song anyways.

Unlike our Alpha Couple and like the subject (not the speaker) of “Going to Georgia,” some Darniellian protagonists do try to jump off the vessel when they can no longer convince themselves it isn’t sinking, but more often than not, it’s a fruitless endeavor. “Going to Bristol,” for instance, captures the precise moment when staying stops being an option, when escape becomes necessity—but from the point of view of the one being escaped from. Darnielle injects a sense of unease into the song immediately, even before the conflict is actually introduced: “I looked you up and down / I liked everything I saw / From the fragile outline of your hips / To the trembling movements in your jaw.”

There’s something viscerally uncomfortable about those lines alone, the idea that your partner looks at you breaking down with casual ease, that they come across you falling apart and think only that they like what they see. Then: a coffee cup shatters, bags are packed, a hand is placed on the doorknob. Then: the key breaks off in the deadbolt lock, the escapee says they can’t take it anymore for the second time in one day (which Darnielle voices with mounting desperation), their partner urges them to “sit still, it’s going to be OK.” We’re not told if anyone actually ends up leaving, but we don’t need to—the brittleness of the moment speaks for itself.

It’s moments like these where the album’s lo-fi recording noticeably enhances rather than detracts from the material; the tape hiss and the room tone become part of the story, creating an atmosphere of immediacy that no amount of studio polish could achieve. “Going to Bristol” is a strikingly intimate song, but we’re reminded of its status as a “made thing”—and our status as listeners, as voyeurs, even—with every lingering boombox buzz. We’re watching this relationship crumble from the viewpoint of a metaphorical “fly on the wall,” as the excellent track “Standard Bitter Love Song #7,” which also chronicles the disintegration of a relationship, put it a little earlier on in the record.

While I don’t think the point of “Standard Bitter Love Song #7”—which is, of course, the seventh in Darnielle’s “Standard Bitter Love Song” series, although the majority of the others are unreleased—is necessarily to bring attention to the relationship between the listener, singer and character, it’s not hard to find that latent commentary lingering underneath. The lovers’ attempt at talking things out is continually disrupted by “the innumerable flies in this room.” “You try to speak,” Darnielle sings, “but the buzzing’s too loud.” It’s as if the narrative is itself disturbed by Darnielle’s act of creation, of turning the story into a “made thing” for audiences to consume. Us, the innumerable flies on the wall; the “loud buzzing,” the constant hiss of the tape. While the speaker insists, “If I’d been one of those flies / I would have lodged myself firmly underneath your eyelid / It would’ve been real different around here,” we listener-flies remain on our perch on the wall like buzzards, watching the death of this love so we can swoop in and feast on the emotional remains.

Maybe this is a bit too much “close-reading” and “literary analysis” for an album review—but if any artist calls for it, it’d be the Mountain Goats. After all, there is an entire website dedicated to annotating the band, providing footnotes for references, explanations for mythological namedrops and translations for unexplained Latin. Darnielle himself thinks “songwriting is literary” and says shit like, “The songs are dramatic monologues so the character exists only for the utterance. Hoo boy, you’re not going to get much more academic than that!” So who am I, as an English major raised by an English professor (in Tallahassee, Florida, of all places!), to resist Darnielle’s literary siren call?

But as academic as Mountain Goats songs are—Darnielle manages to fit references to Beowulf (“Grendel’s Mother”), Euripides (“Alpha in Tauris”), Japanese filmography (“Song for Tura Santana”), Mexican snake breeds (“Sinaloon Milk Snake Song”), Don DeLillo’s White Noise (the “Orange Ball of…” series) and Aztec mythology (“Azo Tle Nelli in Tlaltipac?,” “Quetzalcoatl Eats Plums,” and “Quetzalcoatl Is Born”) into the 40-minute runtime of Zopilote Machine—the songs themselves never feel academic, pretentious or inaccessible. While efforts like “Grendel’s Mother” might be augmented by pre-existing knowledge of Beowulf, the emotional weight of the song is in its visceral portrayal of the violence of grief, and there is no required reading necessary to understand that.

The same goes for all of the Aztec allusions, which are included not to force the uninitiated listener into confusion but to blend the knowns of the mundane with the unknowns of myth. “Quetzalcoatl Eats Plums” transforms domestic paralysis into cosmic significance, with its protagonist unable to leave their yard because “the plum tree hung heavy in my head… in my heart… over me,” unable to remember what they were calling to tell their loved one “because through the clean, clean windows / Saw the plum tree’s leaves as red as fresh blood.”

By the time we reach the record’s closing track, “Quetzalcoatl is Born,” the personal has become mythologized, and the mythological has become personal. The song takes place on “a cold night in Sonora,” which could either refer to the Mexican state or the Californian town (Darnielle spent time in his California during his youth, so it may be the latter), when “the stars are out in full force / It’s a moment the world has been waiting for / When you set the world back on course / Into the fire you go.” It’s a verse that rings true to anyone who has ever stood on the daunting precipice of a life-altering decision they’re not sure they want to make but are told will be for the best—and it is also is an accurate retelling of the beginning of the Aztec creationist myth of the “fifth sun,” in which the gods urge two amongst them to walk into a bonfire to birth the new era.

The humanity of the first verse bleeds into the larger-than-life myth of the second, which chronicles the birth of the “Lord of the Snails” (an arrogant god who volunteered himself to become the sun but whose eventual cowardice saw him retire in shame as the moon) while the subject of the song (presumably the weak, despised Little God Purulent, who was chosen against his will to become the moon, but whose bravery in the face of sacrifice allows him to become the sun) “takes[s] on divinity” to the soundtrack of “crackling, well…snapping corn” (a reference to Quetzalcoatl’s gifting of maize to the Aztecs). It’s a reimagining of Aztec creation myths through a lens of personal apocalypse, phoenix-rising-from-the-ashes style, existing within a timeless, dreamlike landscape where ancient lore and modern anxieties become indistinguishable.

In fact, everything seems to become indistinguishable from everything else on Zopilote Machine. The album travels between Tallahassee, California, Malibu, San Bernardino, Sonora and Singapore like they’re the only stable, mappable landmarks in a world that’s constantly in flux. “I remember the states and the names of the cities,” Darnielle sings in “Sinaloon Milk Snake Song,” as the soaring voices of the Bright Mountain Choir pop in and out, aglow just as their name suggests. “But I don’t remember you.” The presence of the Choir (made up of Rachel Ware, Amy Piatt, Sarah Arslanian and Roseanne Lindley, all of whom only appear as a collective on Zopilote Machine; other albums feature them as individuals, with Ware the most frequent collaborator) isn’t mere ornamentation, either. Their voices flutter in and out of the mix, sometimes hitting the words and sometimes not, light and uncertain yet always fleeting, much like the memories the song’s narrator can’t seem to grab ahold of. All that remains is the place: California, Malibu. States and cities. Everything else? Melted down by the sun, as we’re told in the song’s opening line.

Mortality lurks throughout Zopilote Machine, perched like the album’s titular buzzard sat in “Alpha Sun Hat”’s guava tree. So many of the tracks chronicle the things we do out of fear of finality, the lengths we’ll go to prevent an end, any end—the end of a relationship, the end of an era, the end, even, of some vague, indefinable feeling you can’t quite put words to. We keep holding on, despite everything that’s wrong—despite tasting the ice cream that shouldn’t be black, hearing the braying of hounds that shouldn’t be there, forgetting the message we shouldn’t have forgotten.

As always, the moment is sweet, but it’s all wrong. It’s all wrong, and yet we want to play along anyways—because if we don’t, if we instead let the moment end, then we’ll break down just like the narrator of “Alpha in Tauris”: “My brain gets flooded over six hours later / Rivers run with pictures of you as I stare up at the blood red moon / Lying out front on the lawn.” The only equivalent force to balance against our rejection of finality is our obsessive fascination with it. We are at once the voyeuristic zopilotes and the physicalized finality they feast on. Sometimes we watch a carcass rot from on high, sometimes we throw ourselves into rotting as if it were a show of strength. There’s a kind of glory in going down with the ship, after all. You go into the fire because you hope to come out the sun.

But there’s no real glory or romance in any of this; there’s just life and living it. From the doomed captains of the Alpha Couple, to the collapsing of mundane and myth, to the living vulture and the dead meat it feeds on: The line between love and hate—or mundanity and myth—or life and death—or ends and beginnings—is always paper-thin, always easily blurred and erased, and John Darnielle effortlessly exploits each one again and again, two minutes at a time, finding new fault-lines to tear open with each song.

The blending of dichotomy in Zopilote Machine is not limited to content, either; it’s seen in its form, as well. Most music is reliant upon a separation between the experience of the listener in consuming it and the experience of the musician in creating it. Songs should not sound half-baked, unpolished; they ought to be finished products fluid enough to emerge fully-formed, like Athena from Zeus’s head. Otherwise, the immersion is lost, and the impact of the song is lessened, or so the typical argument goes. But—what’s so wrong with letting the existence of the songwriting process be audible in a song’s final form? What do we actually lose?

In Zopilote Machine, John Darnielle plops us into worlds that feel so lived-in we could lose ourselves in them, too—but he never fully allows us to do so, and that is by design. The song is a made thing. We are flies on walls in rooms full of intimate conversations, and we are people listening to a guy sing into a boombox for the express purpose of making us feel like flies on walls in rooms full of intimate conversations. And this double awareness that the album evokes, this recognition of the songs as “made things” even as we immerse ourselves within them, should not be seen as a weakness. In fact, considering that Zopilote Machine remains so affecting even now—30 years, 22 Mountain Goats albums and 10,000 new forms of production technology down the line—it feels safe to say that, perhaps, it’s a strength.

Read: “The Mountain Goats: Harbingers of Mystery and Absence”

Casey Epstein-Gross is an Assistant Music Editor at Paste. Her work can be read in Observer, Jezebel, and elsewhere. She is based in New York and can typically be found subjecting innocent bystanders to rambling, long-winded monologues about television and film, music, politics, and any number of opinions on bizarrely irrelevant topics. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].