8 Albums You'll Never Forget Listening To For The First Time

6. The Mountain Goats €“ Beat The Champ

Concept albums are certainly no new thing, but they tend to focus on large concepts (think of Pink Floyd's The Wall, for example, or My Chemical Romance's The Black Parade) or smaller, more intimate concepts (like Sufjan Stevens' Illinois). The concept for the Mountain Goats 2015 record Beat The Champ, then, stands out as something wholly unique: it's a bunch of songs about professional wrestling. You'd wonder how an album could carry thirteen tracks about people who beat each other up for a living, but Beat The Champ manages it with incredible grace and dexterity. In fact, it's the slow realisation that the album is really about wrestling's artifice and intimacy that makes Beat The Champ so striking. It's amazing to think that an album about scripted entertainment could deliver so many emotional punches and moments of profound clarity, but it does just that again and again and again. An album about professional wrestling sounds both gimmicky and impossible to pull off, which makes songwriter John Darnielle's ability to do just that €“ all while making the listener feel €“ so impossible to forget.