Mountain Goats preps new album of Biblical proportions

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REVERB

International

If you're as much as music newshound as I am, you might have heard of Freebass, the three-bassist supergroup led by ex New Order/Joy Division member Peter Hook.

The group, which also features former Smiths bassmaster Andy Rourke and former Stone Roses current Primal Scream bassist Mani, hasn't exactly been productive since they got together, mostly because all three dudes still have other things going on.

But in the past week or so, the Freebass MySpace page once again has shown signs of life, with Hook posting a new song and some news on the band's debut album, which is now being mixed.

The new song is a "rejected demo" for a long instrumental track called "Sugar Daddy", which sounds a lot like a vocal-free New Order. In the MySpace page's three blog updates, all posted since July 21, Hook dishes on the mixing process, and offers a tracklist for the forthcoming album.

From what Hook wrote, he'll be singing two songs on the album. Charlatans UK singer Tim Burgess will also appear, as will Wah! leader Pete Wylie and notorious British outlaw writer Howard Marks. The rest of the vocals are handled by Gary Briggs, formerly of the band Haven.

Freebass' MySpace bio also notes that they've worked with vocalists like Liam Gallagher, Billy Corgan, Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie, and the Stone Roses' Ian Brown.

They've long been known for their high drama packaged in heavily strummed folk guitar, now they've gone biblical. Literally.The new Mountain Goats album is called The Life of the World to Come and it is coming out October 6 via 4AD, and all the songs are named after Bible verses according to head "Goat" John Darnielle.

Recorded earlier this year, the record finds Darnielle working with familiar cohorts Jon Wurster (also of Superchunk and Scharpling and Wurster) on drums and Peter Hughes on bass, and features string arrangements from new friend Owen Pallett, of Final Fantasy-fame.

Darnielle had this to say about the record's themes: "I guess the obvious question is going to be: *John, have you had some sort of religious awakening?' and while I guess lots of people might want to be coy about answering that, that's never really been my style, so: no.

It's not like that. It's not some heavy-narrative-distance deal either, though, and it's not a screed. It's twelve new songs: twelve hard lessons the Bible taught me, kind of. More than that I'd want to wait to say until some people have heard it, which won't be long. Will there be more news soon, quite soon? Like, next week, even? Oh yes there will!"

According to the new issue of industry magazine Music Connection: "Jack White hopes to start working on a solo album at the end of 2009." Though the sidebar accompanies a story with an extensive Q&A with White, he doesn't mention this solo album in the interview.

So either Jack talked about making a solo album in the interview and the editors of Music Connection cut the quote for some reason, or Jack mentioned the whole solo album thing in passing because he's Jack White and he probably has hundreds of solo songs locked up somewhere screaming to be set free in to the world, or the folks at Music Connection just want a lot of hits for their online edition. Let's hope it's all true. I'd love to hear it.

That about wraps it up for this week. Stay tune next week for a profile of a cool new band y'all should know about!

Meanwhile, do drop me a line at undergroundhum@yahoo.com and if you've got a band or know of any cool bands with gigs coming up, email me the full details and I'll be sure to include it in the next Reverb.

See y'all next week!