Alex H

Alright, hear me out; this album might look on its surface like an irreverent tribute to wrestling, but it’s much, much more than that. Not that there’s anything wrong with celebrating wrestling, especially the historic, local Southwestern chapter that the Mountain Goats depict through beautiful, descriptive imagery and a pleasant mixture of purple prose and candid pathological proclamations — but Beat the Champ is also, above all else, a meditation on love, and defeat, and new things that you might think you know plenty about before they come into your life and knock it all down in the best way. The Mountain Goats’ 2015 release sits at the intersection of sincerity and absurdity, as the band’s lead singer recollects the tales of glory and woe that played out in the ring when he was a child whose main sources of hope were faces and heels. Homages to icons like Chavo Guerrero Sr. and Bull Ramos offer something of substance for long-time wrestling fans and historians alike, while songs like Heel Turn 2 and Southwestern Territory delve into the more somber side of putting your body and reputation on the line for the chance to win over the audience. Other songs, like Werewolf Gimmick & Foreign Object, manage to capture the intensity that comes with kayfabe permitting you to be your worst self in and out of the ring for the sake of showmanship, while the more heartfelt numbers like Animal Mask and Unmasked! give the listener a chance to hear the heartfelt reflections of wrestlers who, at the end of the day, are people with goals and ambitions about their shows in the ring and life beyond it; goals that range anywhere from winning this next match to making an example out of their opponent, to seeing their family again. All of this is woven together in a loose collection of narratives about warriors entering the colosseum, knowing full well they may not emerge the same, if they should emerge at all — while the crowd is treated to another weeknight show that provided them the briefest reprieve from a world that’s absurd in entirely different, more mundane ways. In other words, it’s real good, man. Everyone’s got their own preferences because everyone’s gone through their own journeys and made sense of them as best they can, and nowhere is that demonstrated better than in the Mountain Goats discography. Beat the Champ, in my opinion, is the pinnacle of that; it looks at the highest feat a human being can achieve, that of exaggerated performance for others, and humanizes it. It reminds the listener repeatedly that, at the end of the day, the people in unitards and jock straps who spent the last hour pummeling each other, breaking bones, and taking names, are people just like you and me — and their stories are a lot more like ours than we might think.