“I discovered them when a friend burned me a CD of bands he thought I needed to hear. That’s when “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton” caterwauled out of my car speakers and punched me right in the throat. “Hail Satan” became a rallying cry for me and my best friend in high school. We shouted it down the halls for months on end, crisscrossing the linoleum of a tired southern California high school. We yelled it like John Darnielle yelled it, like it was something bigger than just a funny sticking-our-tongue-out-to-the-fundamentalist-Christians at our high school; we yelled it like something had come unhinged and we were never going back to who we once were.” - The Rumpus | Albums Of Our Lives“The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton” is the first song by the Mountain Goats that I ever listened to. It’s weird because I usually forget everything but I have a really vivid memory of sitting in the backseat of a minivan in college, with Nick and Adam, and listening to this for the first time and thinking about how much I wish I would’ve known about this song back in my catholic high school. They closed with this at the show last night and I tried to convince Matt and Tim to get matching “hail satan” tattoos with me and even offered to pay for all of them. I was drunk and ecstatic and so very serious BUT THEY WOULDN’T DO IT.
I think that this is the first Mountain Goats song that I had ever heard, also. Gavin put it on a mix CD for me back in college, one of many great mix CDs.
