"The Mountain Goats Rhythm" is called a Tresillo

Today I learned that the rhythm that I have just thought of as “the Mountain Goats rhythm,” the one that goes “ONE-two-three-ONE-two-three-ONE-two,” is actually called a “tresillo.” I was going to dash off a quick post about it, but a Web search for “mountain goats tresillo” didn’t turn up anything obvious so I ended up feeling like I needed to write The Definitive Reference On The Matter. In the interest of curbing my own obsessive tendencies I have tried to land somewhere short of that.Update as I put the finishing touches on the last paragraph of this post: I failed.

I learned about the tresillo from this interesing video which has absolutely nothing to do with the Mountain Goats:

I should not have been surprised that it has a name; it’s not exactly uncommon. And obviously the Mountain Goats did not invent this rhythm. But I think of it as “the Mountain Goats rhythm” because for like the first decade of the band’s existence it seems like John Darnielle’s go-to acoustic guitar strumming pattern: once I noticed it I started hearing it everywhere in the early songs. It’s especially all over what wannabe music reviewers like myself would call tMG’s “propulsive” songs, but there are plenty of other songs featuring it too: it’s there on “Going to Georgia,” maybe the “band’s” first certifiable “hit.” “Sinaloan Milk Snake Song.” “Going to Lebanon.” “Down Here.” “Sept 16 Triple X Love! Love!” “Send Me An Angel.” “Prana Ferox.” “Alpha Double Negative: Going to Catalina.” “Elijah.” “Baboon.” I could go on. Maybe I will. How about super old shit like “Beach House?” Really super old shit like “Going to Alaska?” Random compilation tracks like “Please Come Home To Hamngatan?” Joke songs like “Anti-Music Song?” Collaborations like “Surrounded”, from that John Vanderslice split EP thing? Every other measure, give or take, of “Night of the Mules?” And, of course, there’s “Two Thousand Seasons.”Just seeing if you were still paying attention with that one.

It’s more frequently modified later in the boombox era (or maybe obscured by the other instruments Darnielle was starting to add in) but it’s still there: in “Then the Letting Go,” in “New Britain,” in “Minnesota,” in “Chinese House Flowers” (which again slips back into the straight-up tresillo strum in the chorus). “The Alphonse Mambo,” under the harmonica and… pump organ?. In “Full Flower” both an acoustic and distorted guitar play it… a first? Probably, if only because in the re-recording of “Going to Kansas” later on Nothing for Juice, the electric does other stuff. In “Cao Dai Blowout” and subtly in “The Last Limit of Bhakti,” now with banjo. In “Yoga,” now in electric guitar and with violin.

Even on songs where Darnielle doesn’t strum a tresillo, it pops up: see the “bass” notes in “We Have Seen The Enemy” and “Seed Song.” Granted, the Mountain Goats have like 600 songs, but still: I rest my case. Maybe the lyric in “You Were Cool” should have been “This is a song with the same strumming pattern I use most of the time / When I’ve got something on my mind / And I don’t want to squander the moment.”

Nevertheless, I do feel the need for one more chunk of evidence. Heretic Pride, when the band got a real full-time drummer in Jon Wurster, is sort of the extinction burst of the tresillo in tMG musicPitchfork’s review alludes to JD’s use of the tresillo in describing Wurster’s playing: “Of all the musicians that have come and gone in the 4AD era, Superchunk’s Jon Wurster is—Peter Hughes aside—the first to hear, and replicate, the precise, surging, and teeth-chattering headlong rhythm that is Darnielle’s stock-in-trade.” And, of course, later on it refers to three of the album’s livelier songs, two of which feature the tresillo, as “propulsive.”

. It’s incredibly clear and obvious in five of its 13 songs: lead single “Sax Rohmer #1,” the title track, “Autoclave,” “In the Craters on the Moon,” and “How to Embrace a Swamp Creature.”

I tend to assume that when Wurster joined the band he pushed Darnielle away from his main rhythmic go-to— or just freed him up from having to do something passing for a drumbeat on an acoustic guitar— but in truth I was thinking the tresillo was on its way out starting at around All Hail West Texas, the last album of the Mountain Goats’ “boombox era.” That album really only has “Distant Stations,” and the same year’s studio album Tallahassee doesn’t really have any tresillo to speak of.Errata: I shared this post in a Mountain Goats discord and someone pointed out that literally the very first thing heard on Tallahassee is a two-note bassline in the tresillo pattern. Okay, but aside from that incredibly obvious example, there’s no tresillo on Tallahassee.

There’s just “Woke Up New” on the uncharacteristically slow and somber Get Lonely. Oops, there’s also “Cobra Tattoo.” And “Moon Over Goldsboro,” and uh there it is between the arpeggios on the title track. OK, and so I was going to say “but there aren’t any on The Sunset Tree really” but then I listened back again and… oh, right. there it is front and center in “Up the Wolves,” possibly one of the top 5 iconic Mountain Goats songs, certainly top 10. And why not? By this point JD was Bruce Lee’s man who’s practiced one kick 10,000 times.

Okay, so maybe Heretic Pride really was an extinction burst and Wurster was the death knell, because tresillos are actually very thin on the ground in recent tMG music. There’s exactly one on its follow-up, The Life of the World to Come, in what could be called its old-school Mountain Goats banger “Psalms 40:2,” and a couple tucked away near the end of Songs for Pierre Chuvin, the resurrected-boombox album John Darnielle made in the thick of the pandemic. There’s the ghost of one in Wurster’s drums on “Harbor Me.” But I don’t really expect to hear John strumming away in that old familiar ONE-two-three-ONE-two-three-ONE-two anymore. Even Bleed Out, the liveliest front-to-back tMG album since Heretic Pride, just has that bassline in “Extraction Point.”

I don’t have a conclusion to this post because the only point of it was to comment on John Darnielle’s use of the tresillo rhythm and how it’s trended over the years, and I think I’ve done that. But if you’re a Mountain Goats fan, why not send me an email or hit me up on Mastodon to tell me if you noticed the tresillo and if so, whether you knew it was called that? (Or tell me I’m totally off base and my examples are all cherry-picked, whatever. Just don’t be mean to me.)