Twenty years after John Darnielle began recording albums on a boombox, his head is still exploding with words. The Mountain Goats' latest shows Darnielle's folk rock growing more diverse, swelled with strings and choral harmonizing. "High Hawk Season" sounds like Fleet Foxes reimagined as a New York street gang with lit Ph.D.s. Darnielle's lyrics here are more impressionistic, but his wordplay is always suffused with emotion. When he sings "these bite marks deep in my arteries" on "Damn These Vampires," he seems to be cursing pop culture's hold on him — and savoring it, too.

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“Ambling Alp”

The "Ambling Alp" was the nickname of the six-and-a-half-foot-tall Primo Carnera. Though the song is named after the Italian-born 1930s heavyweight champion, Yeasayer are actually paying tribute to boxing legend Joe Louis with this first-person psychedelic dance-rock tune. “I was always interested in writing a song that had boxing mythology in it,” Yeasayer’s Chris Keating said. “It’s pretty fascinating: There were so many amazing characters, and it was so closely entwined with 20th century history.” Yeaseyer also invokes German champ Max Schmeling and hints at the historical significance placed on the historic bouts between the Nazi-era boxer and the African-American Louis.