Dave Segal on Truckasauras' "serious" alter-ego, Foscil:

All this booze talk may lead you to believe that Foscil's new album, Residential (due out in December as a triple 7-inch as well as digitally via Byron Kalet's Journal of Popular Noise zine), is a boisterous party record or a tear-soaked Pogues-athon. Not so. Much of the 12-track all-instrumental release evokes the bravura melancholy of Miles Davis and Gil Evans's Sketches of Spain, Tortoise's more languorous post-rock reveries (marimba figures prominently), and Ennio Morricone's sorrowful yet dulcet spaghetti-western scores. Other diversions occur in "Latona," which features a triumphant, Don Cherry—esque trumpet fanfare, and "Roy the Barber," whose mesmerizing, ascending chord progression sounds like a gorgeous paraphrase of a 17th-century classical-music piece, but which Adam composed with crucial accompaniment from Moore. The all-analog studio setup, along with editing and effects techniques influenced by Miles's studio wiz Teo Macero and Lee "Scratch" Perry, lends Residential that trademark warmth that even today's finest computers can't replicate.

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They told Fences to go to rehab; he said yes, yes, yes.

If Fences' Chris Mansfield doesn't have a record deal by the time you recycle this newspaper—or refresh this page or whatever—then something is seriously wrong with the music business (I know, news flash). The 26-year-old singer-songwriter has pretty much everything going for him: classical training, crucial industry connections, and most importantly, a finished first album just begging for the right label to release it. He has just enough going against him, as well: a slightly troubled but more or less taken-care-of past, wall-to-wall tattoos, a brooding demeanor—he could be the kind of damaged, bad-for-you heartthrob that the Northwest hasn't convincingly produced since Elliott Smith (or at the very least Art Alexakis).

[...] "When I first moved here, I just felt so creative," he says. "I was banging songs out. I have probably 50 to 100 songs that no one's heard yet. I'll play some of them live, but I probably have a couple more records already lined up and ready to go. I just still feel so fucking full of music right now."

But it was also a period of depressive drinking, which Mansfield talks about with an evasiveness that suggests he either wants to forget those benders or else really has trouble remembering them. "I guess I was doing whatever you could think of, just normal drunk bullshit, the shit that we all do when we're wasted," he says. "I haven't fallen off a stage or punched Eddie Vedder in the face or done anything wild like that."

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The Mountain Goats play tonight at the Showbox at the Market . This week in the Stranger's music section, I dig into their new album, The Life of the World to Come:

The Mountain Goats' latest, The Life of the World to Come, appears at first to be more pious. Each of its 12 tracks is named after a Bible verse, and Darnielle has framed it as "12 hard lessons the Bible taught me"—for instance, "Genesis 3:23" ("So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden...") is a song about him visiting his old place in Portland and about how you can't go home again. But Darnielle's spiritual path has been convoluted—he was raised Catholic (and remembers it fondly), became a strident atheist in high school, then returned to the church, and now attends Hare Krishna services as enthusiastically as he does Mass—and his current stance is ambiguous. In a recent Pitchfork interview, he said, "The story of my religiousness is a long thing... I mean, I go to church, but I don't have the faith of the people there." His previous album was called Heretic Pride; one of his early breakthrough songs, "The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton" ends with a rousing refrain of "hail Satan!" On the new record, his interest in the Bible comes across as more literary and theological than devotional. He recasts its archetypal narratives to modern troubles and even incorporates more poetic bits of scripture directly into his own lyrics.

Read and comment on the whole thing here.

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