i ran across a CD of theirs at a library and i realized how great this band is.

anybody else here like/listen to them

oh, the CD was Heretic Pride

heretic pride might be my least favourite mountain goats album

they are really good until you discover all of their albums are exactly the same

Case study in "if cocksure really was as committed to total subjectivity as he think he is..."

"I thought they were really good until I discovered that all of their albums are exactly the same."

In this second sentence that I wrote, the subjective nature of the statement is inferred by using the first person, rather than the declarative second person pronoun "you" which indicates that the person in which it is directed will also think this way upon listening to the full mountain goats catalog, because it is a fact.

i greatly enjoy this band but in measured doses. darnielle is a frigging great lyricist and performer but mr cocksure is correct, there's not a lot of variation musically

Heretic Pride could be all i need then

trotski, you're wrong. i don't think everyone will make the same discovery upon listening to his discography. i am saying that you will likely observe this also, since we are more or less part of the same culture - one that recognises melodies and chords and instrumentation and song structures and the like. and in these areas almost all mountain goats albums are extremely similar.

however, that doesn't mean that you are wrong for disagreeing with this, or that you will absolutely certainly dislike the mountain goats for it. i was really talking about myself with that 'you' here, which i find obvious, and which you wouldn't even notice if you didn't want to expose logical flaws in my ultimately irrelevant contributions to this dying subforum

basically, i distinguish between merely descriptive statements (such as "band x has y albums", "song z sounds a lot like song ß") and statements about artistic quality ("band ö is better than band ü"). i think statements of the first kind can contain objective (as in verifiable) knowledge, while the others can't. i am aware that this distinction is perhaps a problematic one. i'm proposing it rather for moral than for epistemological reasons.

Tallahassee
Sunset tree
Get lonely

i first got into The Mountain Goats because they used a couple of their songs (No Children, Old College Try, and Love, Love, Love) on Morel Oral. really good songs. Two of those are on their album Tallahassee, so i'd suggest that one, at least.