The Mountain Goats
Heretic Pride
As a critic/practitioner in the tradition of Patti Smith,
The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle has always written songs from two points of
view at once: the point of view of the
singer/songwriter, and the point of view of the audience—specifically, an
intelligent, critical, opinion-forming audience. On the one hand, this sort of extra-sensory
perception about his own work often leads to a type of literary
over-reaching. Darnielle has come up
with some of the clunkiest rock lines ever put to wax: “The ghosts that haunt
your building are prepared to take on substance,” “Those few who've slipped the
surly bonds will rise like salmon at the spawning,” “The
headstones climbed up the hills.” On
the other hand, Mountain Goats songs are frequently about the inability to
articulate feelings coupled with the urgent need to communicate, and the shaky
timbre of Darnielle’s nasal voice as he wraps his mouth around a garble of
quasi-profound sentiment conveys that contradiction rather, well, eloquently. His songs’ arrangements tend to avoid
confidence, veering instead toward immediacy.
Though pristinely recorded, the acoustic guitars sound slippery and
unsure of themselves; the pianos act as if they could meet disaster at the pinnacle
of every chord. Loving an album by The
Mountain Goats usually means loving a feeling of awkwardness. The band’s perfect songs—“No Children,” “This
Year,” “The Best Heavy Metal Band In Denton”—strike a tenuous balance between
Darnielle’s more affected poetic tendencies and a delicacy in which anything
might happen. This is a band that, when
rehearsing, probably has a “sweet spot” when a song has been played just enough
that the band knows it, but not so much that it loses the possibility that
something could go horribly wrong—like an actor who doesn’t memorize his lines very
well in order to allow for maximum spontaneity.
There’s a lot of fun to be had in listening to Darnielle fall short,
because he’s always aiming for something special, but the moments in The
Mountain Goats’ catalogue when everything clicks are heart-rending—both because
of Darnielle’s skill, and because of the series of perfect circumstances that
had to fall into place for such an occurrence to happen. It’s a minor miracle, then, that 2008
produced an album on which The Mountain Goats do everything absolutely right.
John Darnielle’s favorite albums of the year include albums by Blood Ceremony, The Breeders, Killer Mike, CeCe Winans, Jucifer, and Kaki King, as well as Enslaved, Wetnurse, The Donkeys, Coffins, Hate Eternal, Origin, and Prostitute Disfigurement. This is a man much, much cooler than you or I. Darnielle’s listening habits take him from relentless metal to southern rap to jazz-influenced to gospel, all far, far away from what The Mountain Goats play. Listen closely, however, and you can hear elements of each in Heretic Pride—verbal acuity, technical precision, spiritual uplift. Darnielle has an implicit understanding of how songs work, learned through observation and practice (The Mountain Goats are also one of the most prolific indie bands working.) Each song on Heretic Pride is crafted within an inch of its life, as Darnielle jumps between ballads and hard-edged rockers. The math is not complicated. The ballads often have a fragile, revealing confession at their center—on “How to Embrace a Swamp Creature,” it’s “I’m out of my element/I can’t breathe;” on “So Desperate,” it’s “I felt so desperate in your arms”—but the details in the songwriting give the choruses a lovely weight. “So Desperate” takes place in a parked car in the parking lot of an Episcopalian church; the narrator of “How to Embrace a Swamp Creature” gets claustrophobic while watching the light of an elevator travel up six stories. The more fervent songs thrive on a creepiness akin to that of all those metal bands with weird names Darnielle likes so much. “In the Craters on the Moon” manages to turn string instruments into assault weapons, and Darnielle raises his voice to a yelp. “Lovecraft in Brooklyn” pulls tension out of strained chords as the narrator compares himself to the titular sci-fi/horror writer after admitting, “Woke up afraid of my own shadow/Like, genuinely afraid.”
It all builds to “Michael Myers Resplendent,” which synthesizes the two song styles, creating a ballad with vicious string stabs that tear through it. Darnielle sings from the point of the view of either the Halloween serial killer or the actor playing him. “The prom queen’s caught in the high beams,” he sings at one point. At another, “I spend eight hours in my make-up chair.” Michael Myers is a stand-in for John Darnielle as much as any other protagonist is a stand-in for its author, but what’s interesting is how the lyrics juggle between the two viewpoints—the person doing the killing, and the person getting ready to act like the person doing the killing. Essentially, he’s writing about the John Darnielle the singer/songwriter, and John Darnielle the critical audience member—one who also sees things through the singer/songwriter’s eyes. In the past, he’s had trouble reconciling them both. Heretic Pride, however, is the point when John Darnielle’s two opinions finally agree.
-Martin Brown, 2008
Dies ist ein großer Ort. Ich möchte hier noch einmal.
Posted by: fahrrad | 2009.03.06 at 16:38