The set-up to the tale is telegraphed on the back of the record sleeve, with a short set of sentences explaining the Moon colony and its secret guardians. Apparently, scores of half-alive bodies are kept in incubators on the moon to be used for organs in hospitals world-wide.

Guardians are employed for six month shifts to watch the silent caskets, and these guards spend the other six months of the year equally secluded among silent trees in opulent Colorado cabins.

The story is told through seven songs, each a brief glimpse into the world of our protagonist on his journey from bored night watchman to twisted, horrific cannibal. These glimpses are often poetic and obtuse, only obliquely fitting the narrative structure, so my recap / review is only one perspective on how to interpret these songs. No matter how you interpret them, though, they add up to a pretty chilling scifi horror narrative.

The first track, "Surrounded," led by Mountain Goat John Darnielle, is upbeat enough, but it introduces us to the crushing loneliness of being the secret guardian of an organ harvesting complex on the moon. Our leading man is in Colorado, on a six-month isolated shore-leave from his Moon-duties. The weather has turned sour, and the power's gone out in his cabin, but he's got a generator, so he passes the night surrounded by the white noise and static from his television.

His loneliness is clearly starting to drive him a little batty. As he contemplates the silent, watchful trees surrounding his cabin, he says "let me die, surrounded by machines." Remember, during the other half of the year, he keeps a watchful eye over a collection of half-alive bodies, equally surrounded by machines but not allowed to die.

The next track, the Vanderslice-delivered "Lucifer Rising," shows the seclusion continuing to take its toll. "Call me John the Ripper tearing at your skin," the lonely man says, "some day I'll pay for this." There's a rising intensity to this song, and our protagonist's memories of his home among the "generation fields" and "ventilation domes," surrounded by "body after body, alone..." it's pretty chilling.

"Satori In Denver," headed by Darnielle, is about our hero musing while driving "technically out of bounds" from his enforced seclusion and into the city for supplies. His "anklet buzzing on his leg," he contemplates his "solitude, friend of the friendless," and his thoughts on loneliness actually seem a little less manic, a little more depressing.

Next, on Vanderslice's "Scorpio Rising," our hero seems to be contemplating the strange life of "Bobby" Beausoleil, who starred in and composed the music for the film "Lucifer Rising." He later joined up with Charles Manson. Something about this character seems to resonate with our protagonist who says, "I'm not alright, I'm really not up for the fight."

"Sudden Oak Death," led by Darnielle, is the first time the guilt-ridden watchman gives in to panic and hallucination. Sudden oak death is a tree disease, but this man thinks he's succumbing to something similar. "When the crack sounds in the wood," he tells us, "you will know that I'm down for good." He feels he deserves whatever bizarre, debilitating thing that's taking him over; he's "so ready just to fall down, just to fall down and stay down."

"Columns Pillars Steps," led by Vanderslice, finds our guilt ridden protagonist in an apparently nostalgic mood. He's recalling night-long sojourns, possibly in his life before his involvement with lunar organ harvesters, alone with his guilt; "don't try to comfort me," he says, "I'm inconsolable still."

And finally, our protagonist's enforced solitude, surrounded by silent, watchful trees and accompanied by nothing but his paranoid guilt has finally ended, and a darker, stranger method of release for this guilt has set into his brain.

He's returned to his post at the moon colony on the Darnielle-led "Emerging," and "[he's] starving but the suit keeps [him] warm." He hungers, though, not just for food, but the comfort of a warm sleeping body. He recounts, "I kick an incubator open... sustenance, blessed sustenance oozing from the tomb."

In a last ditch effort for some human contact, he takes up a bizarre ritual: not only does he start sleeping with the half-dead bodies he is in charge of, he's resorted to cannibalizing these bodies. He seems unrepentant, though. "No one's ever gonna come," he justifies, "and nobody's gonna know." His dark ritual will not separate him from the good people of Earth when he finally rejoins them. "I will sail home again, concealed among the upright walking men."

So his journey from lonely but coping to cripplingly alienated and coping in an altogether more drastic, sick way is complete.

The whole of the record hangs together, then, as a very dark, very strange tale, combining elements of Duncan Jones's Moon with the stranger, older Gothic tales of satanic rituals, including touches of the story of Charles Manson's twisted family and the hidden guilt of a Poe story.

All accompanied by the earnest storytelling of the Mountain Goats and the lilting poetic pop of John Vanderslice. The two each seem to be curating their own version of the narrative, but the combination feels like a fully fleshed out (pardon the grisly pun) descent into madness. What's most jarring is how serene and easy this descent seems to be.

The album is no longer available, as it was a limited vinyl pressing sold mostly on the tour these two artists embarked on together. But it's a fascinating record, and some internet searching might reveal some of these tracks. And while none of it is as demented and science-fictiony as this record, the rest of each of these artists' respective catalogs deserve exploring. Bonus: their other records won't keep you up at night dreading the loneliness of a secret, profane duty like harvesting organs on the Moon.

As far as we can tell, Moon Colony Bloodbath was only released as limited-edition vinyl album, with no digital or CD versions available — and the limited edition seems to have sold out. (Or at least, the product page is no longer working.) But we're intrigued by this plot description of the concept album, from one review:

The album tells the story of the secret organ harvesting colony on, you guessed it, the moon. Our protagonist works up there for six months at a time and spends his six months off in just as much isolation at his government provided land in Colorado. The first song, ‘Surrounded', opens up with our hero returning home to a snow storm. He rides out the storm which causes a blackout and cuts the cable, barricading him in his home with his generator, an antenna and his 96 inch television. The rest of the story plays out like Edgar Allen Poe or HP Lovecraft. Upon his return to the Moon he starts sleeping in the incubators used for the organ harvesting operation. Eventually, its unclear if by psychosis or a disaster, he has to turn to cannibalism to survive.

We interviewed the head Mountain Goat, John Darnielle, about his science fictional influences here.

A lot of your songs take place in a bleak semi-destroyed world and focus on collapsing/decaying structures and corrupt systems. Do you think of yourself as a dystopian songwriter? Are you influenced by any particular dystopian works, like Brazil or other post-apocalyptic films?

You know, I hadn't thought of myself like that, mainly because I try to avoid saying "I am thus-and-such a kind of songwriter" — I think you have to be careful not to compartmentalize yourself, or at least that's true for me. But I was a young comics & SF books reader and it's true that much of my favorite stuff involved post-apocalyptic scenarios: Logan's Run was a big movie for me when I was a kid, and there was a James Sallis story in Again, Dangerous Visions that left a huge impression even though I'm not sure I was even reading it right. I barely remember it except that it felt kinda scorched-earth, you know? But always in those movies the best part was when they see, like, the Forbidden Zone in Planet of the Apes, or the overgrown places outside the city where Logan finds Peter Ustinov with his cats. Am I even remembering that right?

One of my favorite songs of yours is "The Day The Aliens Came," the one about waiting eagerly for the genocidal alien invaders to arrive, which was left off the Sunset Tree album. Was there some reason this song was omitted? Could this song inadvertently have given away crucial info on the coming alien invasion?

Yeah we recorded that one in the studio and we sort of went nuts with it — it had this huge treated surf-y electric guitar and jaunty rhythm section and emotionally it just didn't fit into the album at all any more. After a recording session, when you're putting an album together, some songs sort of raise their hands and quietly say "I don't really play well with the others here." And that was true with that song; I dug the song, everybody liked it, it had a great feel. But it was out of place there.

Your new album includes a song about H.P. Lovecraft, "Lovecraft In Brooklyn." Why should we identify with H.P. Lovecraft's feelings of alienation and xenophobia during his exile in Red Hook? What about that image appeals to you? In Lovecraft's case, that alienation leads to all his best speculative horror... do you think xenophobia creates better speculative fiction than xenophilia?

Well the song is not really about Lovecraft — it's sung by a guy who's identifying with Lovecraft at his most xenophobic and terrified. Why does that appeal? I think I'm just attracted to hermits in general — to people who don't feel like they're part of the world, who have a hard time feeling like they're really present in the same space as everybody else.

Second part of your question is self-evidently true, the classic trope is Alien Invasion, right, not Aliens Who Are Swell Folks!

Are there particular science fiction authors you're influenced by? Or other works of science fiction that have had an impact on your writing process?

When I was a kid I pretty much worshiped Harlan Ellison and I still think he's a good writer. Through his interviews & his introductions in the Dangerous Visions books I got into James Sallis & Carol Emshwiller, and I'm still a big Emshwiller fan to this day — she writes such hard good sentences. I think I checked out of the science fiction hotel early in high school and never really looked back, lit-wise — the stuff that was getting popular was Piers Anthony and Anne McCaffrey stuff, and more power to anybody who's into that sort of thing, but I liked much much darker stuff and I started reading Faulkner instead. I think I'm more interested in horror than science fiction ever since — it's more of a constricted niche but it seems to attract writers whose visions are more demented. Not that there isn't plenty of awful horror too of course. If I gotta see one more well-dressed ambiguously sexual vampire whose manners are 19th-century impeccable, I'm gonna fall asleep and never wake up again.

Your new book, Master Of Reality, is about a teenager in an adolescent psychiatric care facility explaining his need for his confiscated copy of the Black Sabbath album the way you'd explain "love to an android," according to the 33 1/3 blog. I'm dying to read it. How far do you pursue this metaphor? Is adult sanity like being an android? Also, the album ends with "Into The Void," about leaving a doomed Earth for outer space. Do you think people still write songs about this type of escapism from a ruined world? (I can't think of any recent "we're leaving Earth" songs, but maybe I'm missing something.)

I think the narrator of the book is saying something that all teenagers know instinctively: that there is something wrong with adults. That, somewhere along the way, the adults lost the plot. Maybe it's just that they got stressed out by having to pay bills, or maybe it's just the nature of aging, but from a teenager's perspective, it looks like aging just strips you of your ability to be reasonable, to be cool, to understand other people. So in that sense, teenagers are living as captives in some colony where the androids have all taken over, and where they've made it clear that they intend to turn their captives into androids, too.

I think people prefer to soak in dystopianism more than write about escape the way Ozzy did — and, to be honest, I think it's posing to focus real hard on "the world is screwed!" tropes. It's like, every emo and metalcore band thinks they're the first people to notice that the world is harsh. Good job dudes! Give yourselves a gold star! Meanwhile Ozzy has the courage to dream, to talk about leaving the world and going someplace where everything's cool, and he sneaks in "the world is screwed" tropes while he's at it - that's what makes for a good lyric, I think — that little bit of extra effort.