Mountain Goats' John Darnielle Gets Satanic With New EP
10/10/2008 By Brock Thiessen

Beware, Bible thumpers — Mountain Goats’ Satanic Messiah has finally gone online. The new four-track EP by Mr. John Darnielle is now up for sale as a digital download at satanicmessiah.com and is available at three different price points/levels of worship: “congregant,” “devotee” and, the highest of the three, “acolyte.” Or if you prefer to refrain from worship, you can just download the release for free.

Late this summer, Darnielle announced the details of Satanic Messiah, which in its physical form comes as double seven-inch limited to 666 copies. And while sticking to the number of the beast for a release is, well, pretty awesome, it makes tracking one down pretty difficult, especially considering it’s only available at Mountain Goats shows, none of which are even scheduled in Canada.

So, this is where the newly launched satanicmessiah.com and its sliding-scale pricing model comes in, allowing everyone to get a taste of these four new Mountain Goats tracks and for Darnielle to do a little experiment in the process. "Part of the point of the exercise is to see whether that's a viable route for smaller-potatoes-than-Radiohead dudes like me," Darnielle recently told Pitchfork regarding the pay-what-you-want EP.

For a little more insight on Satanic Messiah, here is what Darnielle has to say about it on his website:

An option to pay me for my work is available at the linked site, but is by no means a requirement prior to download, as that would be weasel business. You do what you feel. I hope you like these songs; I am fond of them. They remind me of old, vanished things. They're yours now! Share as you see fit, but if you wanna point people at the donation pages, I would appreciate that; there's an .rtf file included in the .zip file that encloses the songs, so if you just share the whole thing zipped, you won't need to do any why-don't-you-donate evangelization yourself. But don't let me stop you! The evangelical urge must go forth unchecked if the Word is to be spread far and wide.

Your servant

jd

Winnie the Pooh after listening to Satanic Messiah
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