The Mountain Goats’ first single from their soon-to-be-officially-released album Heretic Pride, ”Sax Rohmer#1″, has been turned into a music video that centrally features the strongest and most idiosyncratically attractive part of their music apart from John Darnielle’s voice: his lyrics. The words of this song are a swirling, hallucinatory character in the video, as the camera follows their serpentine inscription upon the walls, floors and bodies of the band members. The culminating effect is not unlike that of the big giveaway at the end of Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths,” as the location of the “real” labyrinth is made apparent; Darnielle’s words diverge outwards, having their dalliance with “spies from Imperial China,” “hopeless urchins,” and that “same blonde intersection” but as far as they dangle outwards, they retract with every repetition of the chorus: “I am coming home to you…if its the last thing that I do.” The string of reference fades as the narrative becomes self-conscious and subjective. Watch the parabolic shift…
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