By the time Mountain Goats front man John Darnielle put pen to paper and inked a deal with indie-rock institution 4AD in 2002, the band had already made a significant impression on the underground. Formed in 1991, Mountain Goats (though the only consistent member in all that time has been Darnielle) had already released no less than thirteen full-length albums since 1995 (numbers vary, of course, because of the vortex around which the indie-verse revolves; eventually records fade into obscurity and ultimately become the stuff of urban legend due to lack of availability) and an innumerable multitude of EPs, singles and compilation tracks. It’s funny to say it, but while you might not have known who The Mountain Goats were back then, if you listened to underground music it’s likely that you heard a few songs somewhere, sometime.
Oblivious to all of that, Darnielle and the band (the cast of supporting players has changed repeatedly, but since 2002 bassist Peter Hughes has been a staple) had established themselves as relentlessly and uncompromisingly unique. Many of the aforementioned independent long-players were cassette-only releases that were also manufactured in field recording style on a cheap, department store boom box. Fans and underground aesthetes ate it up of course and, by 2002, The Mountain Goats had already built a following based on word of mouth, the praise that those budget recordings garnered and an incredibly powerful live show.
So what did 4AD have to offer The Mountain Goats that they couldn’t simply make themselves?
Presumably, the first and largest reason for the signing was to increase The Mountain Goats’ visibility. They had already proven they could and would work on their own, so it stood to reason that it’d be the simplest contract ever: band makes records, label promotes records and gets it in front of as many ears as possible. Working in this fashion has, thus far, worked fantastically for The Mountain Goats. The band now finds itself regarded as respectable, remarkably prolific auteurs with a pedigree. What follows is a look at the records that established The Mountain Goats in the minds and hearts of many after being a private pleasure for a decade.
The Mountain Goats
Tallahassee – BUY IT
(4AD, 2002)
Upon signing with a larger label, conventional wisdom would dictate that, excited at the possibility of breaking through on a world stage, a band would start with a bang. The Mountain Goats, however, attract notice because, from the opening seconds of Tallahassee’s title track, John Darnielle and company announce their presence with the exact opposite: a wistful and intimate acoustic ballad. The gambit works because no listener is expecting to be so gently addressed right off the top and that introduction is instantly attractive because it is so simple and so different in comparison to customary practices in pop; no one’s expecting it and it’s instantly welcome when it happens because it’s such a unique curve ball.
That beginning is representative of Tallahassee. Throughout the album’s fourteen tracks, Darnielle finds a way to make the drudgery of everyday life seem magical (“Game Shows Touch Our Lives” is a perfect example as it recalls the introductory monologues for The Price Is Right and Wheel Of Fortune) and that the little things outlined in this deceptively remarkable tiny music are what make life worth living.
While taking the breath of The Mountain Goats’ 4AD releases reveals Tallahassee to be a very subdued and melancholy affair, on its own the album is positively jubilant for fans of indie rock that find something of themselves in it because it isn’t massively produced and wants to convey as much as possible. The record doesn’t bow to production constraints (“See American Right” returns to boom box recording while “Oceanographer’s Choice,” with its reversed passages and reverb-coated vocals, doesn’t bear any similarity at all to the album’s other thirteen tracks), nor does Darnielle attempt to water or dumb down the collegiate vocabulary in his lyric sheets for a greater, maybe-not-so-bright audience.
While Tallahassee might not be the single greatest representation of all things Mountain Goats, it is a very good introduction to one facet of the band’s sound. As the record progresses, the later songs give the impression that the band is capable of much, much more than what’s presented; while they aren’t holding back on Tallahassee (that would potentially offend the older fans), they’re focusing on a tight presentation that leaves it possible to explore other avenues on future releases in short, Tallahassee is The Mountain Goats’ way of baiting listeners.
The Mountain Goats
We Shall All Be Healed – BUY IT
(4AD, 2004)
In a lot of ways, We Shall All Be Healed is the punch line that The Mountain Goats were hinting at toward the end of Tallahassee. The bracing and nervously hurried acoustic rave-up “Slow West Vultures” explodes out of the gate and instantly sets its mood in diametric opposition to the album that preceded it; We Shall All Be Healed is more confident, self-assured and brighter in its delivery and tenor than Tallahassee was and that simple, emotional turn makes the album revelatory. There’s something affirming in Darnielle’s hard-driving acoustic guitar on songs like “Linda Blair Was Born Innocent,” “The Young Thousands” and “Home Again Garden Grove” that will have listeners running back to play them again and again because, in spite of the fact that they’re done with minimal production or accompaniment, they might be some of the hardest-rocking songs released in 2004. Somehow the stark presentation of these songs operates as a hook for them too; listeners get drawn in by Darnielle’s plainspoken vocals (“All Up The Seething Coast” is some of the most captivating spoken-word performance not done by Ani DiFranco or Richard Hell in the last ten years) and they find something of themselves in the unadorned, very simple arrangements of these songs that makes them instantly endearing.
As the record progresses, Darnielle kicks up the levels of intensity with more effects and strings (to no greater effect than on “Quito”) and polishes his off-handed vocal delivery here to a glistening sheen that you can’t deny. Your jaw will drop as your eyes well-up in the late-playing of the album; whether talking about a lonely night in a dry, less-than-one-horse town with no cheer (where he also mentions shooting some guy in the face) in “Against Pollution,” or debating whether or not to join the rats as they desert a ship about to explode in “Cotton,” the singer is never phased by any of the events that surround him. As a study in engaging detachment, We Shall All Be Healed is a fascinating moment.
As the last chords of “Pigs That Run Straightaway Into The Water, Triumph Of” fade out, listeners discover they’re glowing with the effort and elated that everyone got out alive. With We Shall All Be Healed, John Darnielle and his compatriots confirmed what the fans they won with Tallahassee already had an inkling of: they could, in fact, do better. The songs are simple, straightforward and instantly accessible in the way that only a classic rock ‘n’ roll record can be. For his part too, while Darnielle doesn’t do anything so trite as belt the words “So be it” or “So it goes” at any point in these proceedings, he easily sets himself up as alt-rock’s answer to Kurt Vonnegut and We Shall All Be Healed is his band’s first great presentation of that skill with intellectually bent and emotionally removed catharsis in the context of songwriting.
The Mountain Goats
The Sunset Tree – BUY IT
(4AD, 2005)
For those introduced to The Mountain Goats with Tallahassee, there is more to the story that predates that document. The early records span a depth and range of storytelling that no one has ever gone out of their way to recognize as an incredible songwriting talent. For the record though (no pun intended), John Darnielle is one of the great authors of fiction in rock; his characters, images and settings have always arrived fully formed and set for growth in the minds of listeners beyond the constraints of the songs in which they appear. Those that throw on a Mountain Goats record find themselves getting lost in the singer’s strange narratives and believing (or wanting to believe) his fantastic, tall tales.
Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction though and that sentiment is the one that guides The Sunset Tree.
The Mountain Goats’ third album for 4AD is an autobiographical account of John Darnielle’s home life as a young man growing up in Bloomington, Indiana, with an abusive stepfather (most poignantly expressed in “Lion’s Teeth,” which finds Darnielle looking the man straight in the eyes, defiantly) who also gets the rather tongue-in-cheek dedication for this album.
Photos of the not-so-sunny side of home dominate the subject matter of The Sunset Tree but, as is the case with so many great writers, there’s a great deal of conflict on Darnielle’s part regarding what he should be feeling and that torn spirit bleeds regularly into the music; in the wishing lyric sheet and warm piano inflections of “This Year,“ for example, there are still the shadows of anger and judgment on the edge of his voice as Darnielle snarls about a drunken night of video game playing that ends in the singer hitting hit house with his car. “The scene ends badly as you might imagine in a cavalcade of anger and fear” is all the singer says in summation.
In contrast, the tenuous strings of the following “Dilauded” feature similar sentiments to “This Year” but with a completely different, far more cinematic quality that gets positively harrowing as both the music and singer swell. It is in moments like these that it almost seems as if the subject matter cuts a little close to home for the singer’s comfort but, never the sort to back down, Darnielle rides the torrents of unease and allows himself to come unhinged. These are the contrasts that fans pray for from Darnielle; both the driving acoustic numbers (like “This Year” and “Dance Music”) as well as the more orchestrated ones (like “Dilauded” where the singer almost seems to try and hide from sensitive subjects behind a wall of sound) that speak more to Darnielle’s personality and the anatomy of his musical approach and mindset better and more honestly than the more conventional rock tunes that dot the album (“Dinu Lipatti’s Bones” and “Broom People” for instance). Those have their place here too and are enjoyable in their own right, but listeners accustomed to Darnielle’s writing can pick out when he’s focusing on something to avoid looking at something else. That can be frustrating sometimes if you’re not ready for it.
In the final analysis, The Sunset Tree does prove to be a significant stylistic turn for The Mountain Goats. By getting personal and illustrating both what John Darnielle will talk about freely and explicitly as well as those things that he touches on in passing but want to avoid as much as possible, listeners are offered a more complete and greater still image of the songwriter as a man, what he wishes were true, what he recognizes to be true and the mythos that he wishes was reality as well as the parts that he wishes weren’t.
The Mountain Goats
Get Lonely – BUY IT
(4AD, 2006)
Perhaps because The Sunset Tree spent a little too much time a little too close to home, Get Lonely throws some distance between itself and the previous album and virtually everything else for that matter. Okay, so let’s go to the basics of The Mountain Goats’ sound: themes of love, travel, people and their stories (real or imagined) have consistently been at the center of Darnielle and company’s muse and those are the things that get jettisoned for Get Lonely. Rather than glimpses at the big, wide world, Get Lonely focuses on the smallest spaces at hand and at no point deviates from entering them alone.
The record is absolutely dominated by loneliness and isolation; it’s as if, after the massive exposure that We Shall All Be Healed and The Sunset Tree earned The Mountain Goats, singer-songwriter John Darnielle went home, locked the door, sat down, looked at the wall and didn’t avert his gaze until he was finished writing an album of material (well, that’s not true—he went to take a shower at some point as “Maybe Grow Wings” admits). That isn’t necessarily a bad thing lots of musicians have produced good work that way but in this case it has yielded a set that is a little too even and a little too balanced.
The Mountain Goats have typically always reveled in variety be it John Darnielle’s decision to make an album on a cheap tape player alone or to add a spectacular amount of extra instrumentation and produce an enormous wall of sound, or pen disarmingly honest and candid lyrics for one album before spinning fantastic tall tales the next but here, unlike the waveforms that previous albums have ridden, Get Lonely remains perfectly stable and sane for the duration of its runtime. Some of the additional instrumentation that previous records boasted (strings mostly, and piano) edge into songs like “In The Hidden Places” and “Song For Lonely Giants,” but those moments are very few and far between as, content with very minimalist dynamics, Darnielle and a deceptively large group of side players produce static and muted low-key tunes. Trying his hand at more (but only slightly) involved melodies, the singer all but whispers his way through songs like “New Monster Avenue,” “Half Dead” and “Cobra Tattoo” which has listeners straining to hear his incredible tales that, for the first time, aren’t so fascinating and are instead offer a frustrating domesticity at its most simple and serene.
At the time of its release, Get Lonely must have thoroughly confused the new fans that the band had won between Tallahassee, We Shall All Be Healed and The Sunset Tree because it was such a comparative left field play, but older fans that had followed the band since before their jump to 4AD certainly remained unphased. By this point, long-time listeners were well aware of the fact that they were as much at the mercy of Darnielle’s muse as he and, if it took a turn they didn’t like, the only solution was to wait, hope and ride it out as the singer does in order to get to the next wave. As sure as anything, it always comes and, if tradition holds true, in the case of The Mountain Goats, it won’t play out the same way twice.
The Mountain Goats
Heretic Pride – BUY IT
(4AD, 2008)
As if it needed to be said at this point, if one were to look up “idiosyncrasy” in the dictionary—particularly one compiled and edited by the rock press—it’d be totally reasonable to discover a photograph of Mountain Goats’ singer/guitarist/mastermind John Darnielle next to the entry. Since 1995, Darnielle has played the role of mysterious maker of music and worn the mantle well—deciding to record on everything from a cheap department store boom box to the mixing desk in a world-class studio depending upon his mood—and usually penning very autobiographical songs that seem like whimsical fare because the sentiments are surrounded by such wildly varied music and Darnielle’s own peculiar vocal timbre.
In short, the singer has begun to explore more personal and confessional aspects of his songwriting (2005’s Sunset Tree has been Darnielle’s finest forays into consistently personal songwriting to date) to critical praise and fanfare, but Heretic Pride finds the songwriter delving back into storytelling with fantastic results.
It might sound coy, but Heretic Pride is The Mountain Goats’ finest imaginary record to date as far as all of the songs being works of fiction. In thirteen years, Darnielle has been known to veer back and forth between solo acoustic performances and full-band compositions but those ideas have usually been mutually exclusive—if it’s solo acoustic, the songs remain that way for the duration of the record in question or vice versa—but this time out, the performances serve the songs and the tempo of the record bounces back and forth accordingly. There are the uproarious, raucous moments like “Sax Rohmer #1" and “Autoclave,” but also quieter (and only occasionally completely solo but not necessarily tender), acoustic songs like “So Desperate,” and bracing, tense complete changes of pace (“San Bernardino”) to give the record a universal feel—Darnielle has worn all of these hats before, but usually one per record. Here he has tempered his myriad muses into a single perspective that manages to sound balanced rather than schizophrenic because the ties that bind the songs together (speedy acoustic guitar, the singer’s syncopated vocals) are placed at the forefront with everything else added for color.
The singer states his chosen course clearly in the opening seconds of “Sax Rohmer #1” so his audience knows exactly what (to a certain degree and on a primary level) to expect: muscular instrumentation and passive-aggressive vocals are the features that carry on through the duration of these thirteen songs, with only the degrees to which they manifest alternating. “So Desperate,” “Tianchi Lake,” “Marduk T-Shirt Men’s Room Incident” and the reggae-infused “New Zion” are all about the vocals (“Marduk T-Shirt” even features the first appearance of The Bright Mountain Choir for the first time since 1996) while “San Bernardino,” “In the Craters of the Moon” and “How to Embrace a Swamp Creature” are all about Darnielle’s scrappy guitar playing that proves to be more versatile than previously assumed.
By the hymnal and cathartic ending, “Michael Myers Resplendent,” the singer has worked himself to exhaustion. He’s gone in every direction he knows and so the last avenue to take is to just be honest and take a break from the fictitious vibe of the record for a minute. “I am ready for my close-up today/Too long I’ve let my self-respect stand in the way” are the words that open the song and, by then, it’s hard not to believe it; Heretic Pride exposes all of the possibilities that have always been inherent in The Mountain Goats’ music, but for the first time they’ve all come together and the results are a fantastically rounded record that it’s easy to lose oneself in. Darnielle may have spent the last couple of his band’s albums exposing the truth about himself and baring his soul, but Heretic Pride illustrates that while truth may occasionally be stranger than fiction, fiction can be more beautiful and telling of an artist’s ability than truth.
The Mountain Goats
The Life Of The World To Come
(4AD, 2009)
Since first appearing in 1991, Mountain Goats mastermind John Darnielle has discovered and crowned himself king of his own little corner of the subcultural landscape where form (in the context of recording media) has always taken a back seat to musical expression and elucidation. The singer has happily resided in that place and worked at building and detailing his own vision of what pop music should be and that construction process has led him from sitting on the floor of his bed room with a cheap boom box tape recorder to very ,very expensive studio confines and back again as his muse has required and, as he's gone along, he has fortified his corner with walls of strong, insular vision. He's made it all on his own; made the myths that function as the mortar that holds the place together, thrown paint up on the walls, furnished it with different musical refinements (and refinished it a couple of times) and, with each new album, he's invited listeners in to see what he's done with the place. They're always invited to stay and some always do hang around, and after eighteen years, Darnielle's pet project has assembled a pretty impressive congregation of loyal followers and disciples.
So what does every congregation need when it gets large enough? It needs a religious discussion, of course.
The Life Of The World To Come is John Darnielle's enactment of such a discussion and, as far as deciding its place in the book of Mountain Goat goes, it is a far different thing from all of the records that came before. From the very opening of “1 Samuel 15:23” (all of the songs on The Life Of The World To Come take their names from biblical verses and/or Darnielle's impressions of them) listeners will be struck by the intimate and almost hymnal quality that the album regularly projects; where once Darnielle regularly would take the stance of a wild-eyed and raving poet or a conduit for unrest (social, theatrical, literal, literary or personal – or combinations thereof), The Life Of The World To Come is marked at every turn by a far calmer, reassuring and conventionally melodic Darnielle clearly seeking to soothe rather than incite. After the last vestiges of Darnielle's ecstatic rock side fade with “Genesis 3:23” (and, even then, nothing is particularly rocky), songs including “1 John 4:16,” “Matthew 25:21” and “Deuteronomy 2:10” all press in a more ballad-esque, romantic and gentle direction that seems surprisingly genuine and an impressive foil for the previous sounds explored on Heretic Pride, The Sunset Tree and Tallahassee that were given to veering wildly between emotional forms but were never so intimate as this. For listeners accustomed to a much more aggressive and confrontational (even when he is being warm and sweet, John Darnielle's lyric sheets can often read like selections from an Allan Ginsberg novel), such a warm tonality as that expressed on The Life Of The World To Come is definitely a surprise but, as it unfolds, it cannot be said that it is an unwelcome one.
Conversely, a nearly equal amount of time here is spent expanding the terrain that The Mountain Goats occupy. While not for the first time but certainly to the greatest effect to date, the inclusion of strings in songs like “Phillippians 3:20-21” and “1 John 4:16” and well as larger percussive sounds (the production of the drums in “Romans 10:9,” most notably) build The Life Of The World To Come up to a nearly epic scale as the sounds seem to get ever larger and, surprisingly, this band that has often reveled in smaller or scruffier sounds wears the ambitious nature of these new turns surprisingly well; they lend the possibility that The Mountain Goats are capable of far larger things than the band has ever attempted previously.
With the assertion that The Mountain Goats seem to be growing even larger on The Life Of The World To Come made, it begs the question of just what The Mountain Goats may be capable of in future releases. Of course, fans have always upheld that the possibilities for the band have always been endless and only dependent upon Darnielle's own ambition and mood when sessions for another record began but, this time, such conjecture will be shared by everyone – fan or detractor, familiar or uninitiated curiosity-seeker – as they find themselves drawn in so warmly by the singer's storytelling and emotive accessibility that at no moment are they prompted to want to leave. The Life Of The World To Come is an intriguing half-promise that John Darnielle has offered; while fans have never debated the band's quality, this album implies that The Mountain Goats may have greater aspirations in them yet. It'll be interesting to see if the band follows through on it.
Artist:
www.mountain-goats.com
4ad.com/themountaingoats
Download:
The Mountain Goats – “Lion’s Teeth” – mp3
The Mountain Goats – “New Monster Avenue” – mp3
The Mountain Goats – “Palmcoder Yanja” – mp3
The Mountain Goats – “Sax Rohmer #1” – mp3
By the time Mountain Goats front man John Darnielle put pen to paper and inked a deal with indie-rock institution 4AD in 2002, the band had already made a significant impression on the underground. Formed in 1991, Mountain Goats (though the only consistent member in all that time has been Darnielle) had already released no less than thirteen full-length albums since 1995 (numbers vary, of course, because of the vortex around which the indie-verse revolves; eventually records fade into obscurity and ultimately become the stuff of urban legend due to lack of availability) and an innumerable multitude of EPs, singles and compilation tracks. It’s funny to say it, but while you might not have known who The Mountain Goats were back then, if you listened to underground music it’s likely that you heard a few songs somewhere, sometime.
Oblivious to all of that, Darnielle and the band (the cast of supporting players has changed repeatedly, but since 2002 bassist Peter Hughes has been a staple) had established themselves as relentlessly and uncompromisingly unique. Many of the aforementioned independent long-players were cassette-only releases that were also manufactured in field recording style on a cheap, department store boom box. Fans and underground aesthetes ate it up of course and, by 2002, The Mountain Goats had already built a following based on word of mouth, the praise that those budget recordings garnered and an incredibly powerful live show.
So what did 4AD have to offer The Mountain Goats that they couldn’t simply make themselves?
Presumably, the first and largest reason for the signing was to increase The Mountain Goats’ visibility. They had already proven they could and would work on their own, so it stood to reason that it’d be the simplest contract ever: band makes records, label promotes records and gets it in front of as many ears as possible. Working in this fashion has, thus far, worked fantastically for The Mountain Goats. The band now finds itself regarded as respectable, remarkably prolific auteurs with a pedigree. What follows is a look at the records that established The Mountain Goats in the minds and hearts of many after being a private pleasure for a decade.
The Mountain Goats
Tallahassee – BUY IT
(4AD, 2002)
Upon signing with a larger label, conventional wisdom would dictate that, excited at the possibility of breaking through on a world stage, a band would start with a bang. The Mountain Goats, however, attract notice because, from the opening seconds of Tallahassee’s title track, John Darnielle and company announce their presence with the exact opposite: a wistful and intimate acoustic ballad. The gambit works because no listener is expecting to be so gently addressed right off the top and that introduction is instantly attractive because it is so simple and so different in comparison to customary practices in pop; no one’s expecting it and it’s instantly welcome when it happens because it’s such a unique curve ball.
That beginning is representative of Tallahassee. Throughout the album’s fourteen tracks, Darnielle finds a way to make the drudgery of everyday life seem magical (“Game Shows Touch Our Lives” is a perfect example as it recalls the introductory monologues for The Price Is Right and Wheel Of Fortune) and that the little things outlined in this deceptively remarkable tiny music are what make life worth living.
While taking the breath of The Mountain Goats’ 4AD releases reveals Tallahassee to be a very subdued and melancholy affair, on its own the album is positively jubilant for fans of indie rock that find something of themselves in it because it isn’t massively produced and wants to convey as much as possible. The record doesn’t bow to production constraints (“See American Right” returns to boom box recording while “Oceanographer’s Choice,” with its reversed passages and reverb-coated vocals, doesn’t bear any similarity at all to the album’s other thirteen tracks), nor does Darnielle attempt to water or dumb down the collegiate vocabulary in his lyric sheets for a greater, maybe-not-so-bright audience.
While Tallahassee might not be the single greatest representation of all things Mountain Goats, it is a very good introduction to one facet of the band’s sound. As the record progresses, the later songs give the impression that the band is capable of much, much more than what’s presented; while they aren’t holding back on Tallahassee (that would potentially offend the older fans), they’re focusing on a tight presentation that leaves it possible to explore other avenues on future releases in short, Tallahassee is The Mountain Goats’ way of baiting listeners.
The Mountain Goats
We Shall All Be Healed – BUY IT
(4AD, 2004)
In a lot of ways, We Shall All Be Healed is the punch line that The Mountain Goats were hinting at toward the end of Tallahassee. The bracing and nervously hurried acoustic rave-up “Slow West Vultures” explodes out of the gate and instantly sets its mood in diametric opposition to the album that preceded it; We Shall All Be Healed is more confident, self-assured and brighter in its delivery and tenor than Tallahassee was and that simple, emotional turn makes the album revelatory. There’s something affirming in Darnielle’s hard-driving acoustic guitar on songs like “Linda Blair Was Born Innocent,” “The Young Thousands” and “Home Again Garden Grove” that will have listeners running back to play them again and again because, in spite of the fact that they’re done with minimal production or accompaniment, they might be some of the hardest-rocking songs released in 2004. Somehow the stark presentation of these songs operates as a hook for them too; listeners get drawn in by Darnielle’s plainspoken vocals (“All Up The Seething Coast” is some of the most captivating spoken-word performance not done by Ani DiFranco or Richard Hell in the last ten years) and they find something of themselves in the unadorned, very simple arrangements of these songs that makes them instantly endearing.
As the record progresses, Darnielle kicks up the levels of intensity with more effects and strings (to no greater effect than on “Quito”) and polishes his off-handed vocal delivery here to a glistening sheen that you can’t deny. Your jaw will drop as your eyes well-up in the late-playing of the album; whether talking about a lonely night in a dry, less-than-one-horse town with no cheer (where he also mentions shooting some guy in the face) in “Against Pollution,” or debating whether or not to join the rats as they desert a ship about to explode in “Cotton,” the singer is never phased by any of the events that surround him. As a study in engaging detachment, We Shall All Be Healed is a fascinating moment.
As the last chords of “Pigs That Run Straightaway Into The Water, Triumph Of” fade out, listeners discover they’re glowing with the effort and elated that everyone got out alive. With We Shall All Be Healed, John Darnielle and his compatriots confirmed what the fans they won with Tallahassee already had an inkling of: they could, in fact, do better. The songs are simple, straightforward and instantly accessible in the way that only a classic rock ‘n’ roll record can be. For his part too, while Darnielle doesn’t do anything so trite as belt the words “So be it” or “So it goes” at any point in these proceedings, he easily sets himself up as alt-rock’s answer to Kurt Vonnegut and We Shall All Be Healed is his band’s first great presentation of that skill with intellectually bent and emotionally removed catharsis in the context of songwriting.
The Mountain Goats
The Sunset Tree – BUY IT
(4AD, 2005)
For those introduced to The Mountain Goats with Tallahassee, there is more to the story that predates that document. The early records span a depth and range of storytelling that no one has ever gone out of their way to recognize as an incredible songwriting talent. For the record though (no pun intended), John Darnielle is one of the great authors of fiction in rock; his characters, images and settings have always arrived fully formed and set for growth in the minds of listeners beyond the constraints of the songs in which they appear. Those that throw on a Mountain Goats record find themselves getting lost in the singer’s strange narratives and believing (or wanting to believe) his fantastic, tall tales.
Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction though and that sentiment is the one that guides The Sunset Tree.
The Mountain Goats’ third album for 4AD is an autobiographical account of John Darnielle’s home life as a young man growing up in Bloomington, Indiana, with an abusive stepfather (most poignantly expressed in “Lion’s Teeth,” which finds Darnielle looking the man straight in the eyes, defiantly) who also gets the rather tongue-in-cheek dedication for this album.
Photos of the not-so-sunny side of home dominate the subject matter of The Sunset Tree but, as is the case with so many great writers, there’s a great deal of conflict on Darnielle’s part regarding what he should be feeling and that torn spirit bleeds regularly into the music; in the wishing lyric sheet and warm piano inflections of “This Year,“ for example, there are still the shadows of anger and judgment on the edge of his voice as Darnielle snarls about a drunken night of video game playing that ends in the singer hitting hit house with his car. “The scene ends badly as you might imagine in a cavalcade of anger and fear” is all the singer says in summation.
In contrast, the tenuous strings of the following “Dilauded” feature similar sentiments to “This Year” but with a completely different, far more cinematic quality that gets positively harrowing as both the music and singer swell. It is in moments like these that it almost seems as if the subject matter cuts a little close to home for the singer’s comfort but, never the sort to back down, Darnielle rides the torrents of unease and allows himself to come unhinged. These are the contrasts that fans pray for from Darnielle; both the driving acoustic numbers (like “This Year” and “Dance Music”) as well as the more orchestrated ones (like “Dilauded” where the singer almost seems to try and hide from sensitive subjects behind a wall of sound) that speak more to Darnielle’s personality and the anatomy of his musical approach and mindset better and more honestly than the more conventional rock tunes that dot the album (“Dinu Lipatti’s Bones” and “Broom People” for instance). Those have their place here too and are enjoyable in their own right, but listeners accustomed to Darnielle’s writing can pick out when he’s focusing on something to avoid looking at something else. That can be frustrating sometimes if you’re not ready for it.
In the final analysis, The Sunset Tree does prove to be a significant stylistic turn for The Mountain Goats. By getting personal and illustrating both what John Darnielle will talk about freely and explicitly as well as those things that he touches on in passing but want to avoid as much as possible, listeners are offered a more complete and greater still image of the songwriter as a man, what he wishes were true, what he recognizes to be true and the mythos that he wishes was reality as well as the parts that he wishes weren’t.
The Mountain Goats
Get Lonely – BUY IT
(4AD, 2006)
Perhaps because The Sunset Tree spent a little too much time a little too close to home, Get Lonely throws some distance between itself and the previous album and virtually everything else for that matter. Okay, so let’s go to the basics of The Mountain Goats’ sound: themes of love, travel, people and their stories (real or imagined) have consistently been at the center of Darnielle and company’s muse and those are the things that get jettisoned for Get Lonely. Rather than glimpses at the big, wide world, Get Lonely focuses on the smallest spaces at hand and at no point deviates from entering them alone.
The record is absolutely dominated by loneliness and isolation; it’s as if, after the massive exposure that We Shall All Be Healed and The Sunset Tree earned The Mountain Goats, singer-songwriter John Darnielle went home, locked the door, sat down, looked at the wall and didn’t avert his gaze until he was finished writing an album of material (well, that’s not true—he went to take a shower at some point as “Maybe Grow Wings” admits). That isn’t necessarily a bad thing lots of musicians have produced good work that way but in this case it has yielded a set that is a little too even and a little too balanced.
The Mountain Goats have typically always reveled in variety be it John Darnielle’s decision to make an album on a cheap tape player alone or to add a spectacular amount of extra instrumentation and produce an enormous wall of sound, or pen disarmingly honest and candid lyrics for one album before spinning fantastic tall tales the next but here, unlike the waveforms that previous albums have ridden, Get Lonely remains perfectly stable and sane for the duration of its runtime. Some of the additional instrumentation that previous records boasted (strings mostly, and piano) edge into songs like “In The Hidden Places” and “Song For Lonely Giants,” but those moments are very few and far between as, content with very minimalist dynamics, Darnielle and a deceptively large group of side players produce static and muted low-key tunes. Trying his hand at more (but only slightly) involved melodies, the singer all but whispers his way through songs like “New Monster Avenue,” “Half Dead” and “Cobra Tattoo” which has listeners straining to hear his incredible tales that, for the first time, aren’t so fascinating and are instead offer a frustrating domesticity at its most simple and serene.
At the time of its release, Get Lonely must have thoroughly confused the new fans that the band had won between Tallahassee, We Shall All Be Healed and The Sunset Tree because it was such a comparative left field play, but older fans that had followed the band since before their jump to 4AD certainly remained unphased. By this point, long-time listeners were well aware of the fact that they were as much at the mercy of Darnielle’s muse as he and, if it took a turn they didn’t like, the only solution was to wait, hope and ride it out as the singer does in order to get to the next wave. As sure as anything, it always comes and, if tradition holds true, in the case of The Mountain Goats, it won’t play out the same way twice.
The Mountain Goats
Heretic Pride – BUY IT
(4AD, 2008)
As if it needed to be said at this point, if one were to look up “idiosyncrasy” in the dictionary—particularly one compiled and edited by the rock press—it’d be totally reasonable to discover a photograph of Mountain Goats’ singer/guitarist/mastermind John Darnielle next to the entry. Since 1995, Darnielle has played the role of mysterious maker of music and worn the mantle well—deciding to record on everything from a cheap department store boom box to the mixing desk in a world-class studio depending upon his mood—and usually penning very autobiographical songs that seem like whimsical fare because the sentiments are surrounded by such wildly varied music and Darnielle’s own peculiar vocal timbre.
In short, the singer has begun to explore more personal and confessional aspects of his songwriting (2005’s Sunset Tree has been Darnielle’s finest forays into consistently personal songwriting to date) to critical praise and fanfare, but Heretic Pride finds the songwriter delving back into storytelling with fantastic results.
It might sound coy, but Heretic Pride is The Mountain Goats’ finest imaginary record to date as far as all of the songs being works of fiction. In thirteen years, Darnielle has been known to veer back and forth between solo acoustic performances and full-band compositions but those ideas have usually been mutually exclusive—if it’s solo acoustic, the songs remain that way for the duration of the record in question or vice versa—but this time out, the performances serve the songs and the tempo of the record bounces back and forth accordingly. There are the uproarious, raucous moments like “Sax Rohmer #1" and “Autoclave,” but also quieter (and only occasionally completely solo but not necessarily tender), acoustic songs like “So Desperate,” and bracing, tense complete changes of pace (“San Bernardino”) to give the record a universal feel—Darnielle has worn all of these hats before, but usually one per record. Here he has tempered his myriad muses into a single perspective that manages to sound balanced rather than schizophrenic because the ties that bind the songs together (speedy acoustic guitar, the singer’s syncopated vocals) are placed at the forefront with everything else added for color.
The singer states his chosen course clearly in the opening seconds of “Sax Rohmer #1” so his audience knows exactly what (to a certain degree and on a primary level) to expect: muscular instrumentation and passive-aggressive vocals are the features that carry on through the duration of these thirteen songs, with only the degrees to which they manifest alternating. “So Desperate,” “Tianchi Lake,” “Marduk T-Shirt Men’s Room Incident” and the reggae-infused “New Zion” are all about the vocals (“Marduk T-Shirt” even features the first appearance of The Bright Mountain Choir for the first time since 1996) while “San Bernardino,” “In the Craters of the Moon” and “How to Embrace a Swamp Creature” are all about Darnielle’s scrappy guitar playing that proves to be more versatile than previously assumed.
By the hymnal and cathartic ending, “Michael Myers Resplendent,” the singer has worked himself to exhaustion. He’s gone in every direction he knows and so the last avenue to take is to just be honest and take a break from the fictitious vibe of the record for a minute. “I am ready for my close-up today/Too long I’ve let my self-respect stand in the way” are the words that open the song and, by then, it’s hard not to believe it; Heretic Pride exposes all of the possibilities that have always been inherent in The Mountain Goats’ music, but for the first time they’ve all come together and the results are a fantastically rounded record that it’s easy to lose oneself in. Darnielle may have spent the last couple of his band’s albums exposing the truth about himself and baring his soul, but Heretic Pride illustrates that while truth may occasionally be stranger than fiction, fiction can be more beautiful and telling of an artist’s ability than truth.
The Mountain Goats
The Life Of The World To Come
(4AD, 2009)
Since first appearing in 1991, Mountain Goats mastermind John Darnielle has discovered and crowned himself king of his own little corner of the subcultural landscape where form (in the context of recording media) has always taken a back seat to musical expression and elucidation. The singer has happily resided in that place and worked at building and detailing his own vision of what pop music should be and that construction process has led him from sitting on the floor of his bed room with a cheap boom box tape recorder to very ,very expensive studio confines and back again as his muse has required and, as he's gone along, he has fortified his corner with walls of strong, insular vision. He's made it all on his own; made the myths that function as the mortar that holds the place together, thrown paint up on the walls, furnished it with different musical refinements (and refinished it a couple of times) and, with each new album, he's invited listeners in to see what he's done with the place. They're always invited to stay and some always do hang around, and after eighteen years, Darnielle's pet project has assembled a pretty impressive congregation of loyal followers and disciples.
So what does every congregation need when it gets large enough? It needs a religious discussion, of course.
The Life Of The World To Come is John Darnielle's enactment of such a discussion and, as far as deciding its place in the book of Mountain Goat goes, it is a far different thing from all of the records that came before. From the very opening of “1 Samuel 15:23” (all of the songs on The Life Of The World To Come take their names from biblical verses and/or Darnielle's impressions of them) listeners will be struck by the intimate and almost hymnal quality that the album regularly projects; where once Darnielle regularly would take the stance of a wild-eyed and raving poet or a conduit for unrest (social, theatrical, literal, literary or personal – or combinations thereof), The Life Of The World To Come is marked at every turn by a far calmer, reassuring and conventionally melodic Darnielle clearly seeking to soothe rather than incite. After the last vestiges of Darnielle's ecstatic rock side fade with “Genesis 3:23” (and, even then, nothing is particularly rocky), songs including “1 John 4:16,” “Matthew 25:21” and “Deuteronomy 2:10” all press in a more ballad-esque, romantic and gentle direction that seems surprisingly genuine and an impressive foil for the previous sounds explored on Heretic Pride, The Sunset Tree and Tallahassee that were given to veering wildly between emotional forms but were never so intimate as this. For listeners accustomed to a much more aggressive and confrontational (even when he is being warm and sweet, John Darnielle's lyric sheets can often read like selections from an Allan Ginsberg novel), such a warm tonality as that expressed on The Life Of The World To Come is definitely a surprise but, as it unfolds, it cannot be said that it is an unwelcome one.
Conversely, a nearly equal amount of time here is spent expanding the terrain that The Mountain Goats occupy. While not for the first time but certainly to the greatest effect to date, the inclusion of strings in songs like “Phillippians 3:20-21” and “1 John 4:16” and well as larger percussive sounds (the production of the drums in “Romans 10:9,” most notably) build The Life Of The World To Come up to a nearly epic scale as the sounds seem to get ever larger and, surprisingly, this band that has often reveled in smaller or scruffier sounds wears the ambitious nature of these new turns surprisingly well; they lend the possibility that The Mountain Goats are capable of far larger things than the band has ever attempted previously.
With the assertion that The Mountain Goats seem to be growing even larger on The Life Of The World To Come made, it begs the question of just what The Mountain Goats may be capable of in future releases. Of course, fans have always upheld that the possibilities for the band have always been endless and only dependent upon Darnielle's own ambition and mood when sessions for another record began but, this time, such conjecture will be shared by everyone – fan or detractor, familiar or uninitiated curiosity-seeker – as they find themselves drawn in so warmly by the singer's storytelling and emotive accessibility that at no moment are they prompted to want to leave. The Life Of The World To Come is an intriguing half-promise that John Darnielle has offered; while fans have never debated the band's quality, this album implies that The Mountain Goats may have greater aspirations in them yet. It'll be interesting to see if the band follows through on it.
Artist:
www.mountain-goats.com
4ad.com/themountaingoats
Download:
The Mountain Goats – “Lion’s Teeth” – mp3
The Mountain Goats – “New Monster Avenue” – mp3
The Mountain Goats – “Palmcoder Yanja” – mp3
The Mountain Goats – “Sax Rohmer #1” – mp3
