Not many musicians would even think to write a concept album about organ harvesting, but in 2009, John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats (And The Extra Lens) teamed up with his regular producer John Vanderslice to take it a step further and create a concept album about harvesting organs on the moon… This project eventually became the EP Moon Colony Bloodbath. I first stumbled across the EP via YouTube’s (Not YouTube Music’s) auto-generated playlists feature where notasfarwest had uploaded a rip of it, and I was immediately enthralled. The album takes you through 7 tracks, mostly taking place in secluded, rural, government-owned Colorado, and all concerning the life of a man, one of the organ harvesters who work on the moon, taking from humans that they keep barely alive in incubators (See the liner notes of the 2024 re-release). As listeners, we get a relatively compassionate view of this man, as we see him in his downtime back on Earth, living in solitary luxury between some of his stints off planet.

All of this preamble makes this sound like a really far-out album, yet one of the things I love most about this album is how well I can relate to Darnielle’s lyrics. Whether it be in my favorite line from the album’s first song, Surrounded, “Let me die, let me die Surrounded by machines”, or in the album’s sixth song where he tackles loss of relationships through the lens of distance’s crushing weight on human connection, Moon Colony Bloodbath is an EP that almost works better on an uninformed listen as they hear references to corporeal things and understand the finer points of human emotion that this one man feels.

Over the past 3 years that the album has been playing on semi-repeat in my headphones, it’s meant a lot of different things to me, starting off just as a calm-sounding song that references a couple places that meant a lot to me in its lyrics and titles (See: Satori in Denver), then it progressed to a representation of how subtlety in storytelling can make for beautiful, vivid details, and finally to where I am with it now.