Pages tagged “the mountain goats”

In 2005, Mountain Goats frontman John Darnielle released a terrific little song called “Dance Music,” which chronicled the harrowing experience of growing up. The point of the song was that, when times get really hard, it’s easy to find escapist comfort in dance music. In moments of chaos, Darnielle suggests, you can use the simple pleasures of a dance track to drown out the noise—“so this is what the volume knob’s for,” he sings in one memorable line. We love this sentiment. Lately, dance music is practically all we listen to. And perhaps it’s no coincidence that 2008 has been a tremendous year for songs driven by beats. Is this how we’re distracting ourselves from the financial crisis?

There are several very distinct types of Mountain Goats fans. There's that kid at the show who sits at the back table, alone, writing in his poetry book and making loose sketches of dragons while occasionally whispering his request for "Fall Of The Star High School Running Back." Then there's the guy who you think might have been that quiet TA in the contemporary novel class you took who you never thought you'd see spazzing out to "Dance Music." And lastly, our favorite here at Paste is your friend who dug up his own fifth of Hood River gin and has been moved to a sweat-dripping and fist-pumping (but still reverent) kneel as he stands only feet from the stage, matching Darnielle shout for shout on every painfully gripping line of "No Children."

The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle is a contrarian by necessity, in the sense that he probably doesn’t know how to be anything else. The mondo literary songwriter’s independent streak has become something of a creative apparatus over his 17-year career, first producing a fiercely underground boombox-recorded canon split between cassettes, 7-inches and compilations, and lately a series of increasingly polished studio recordings for the 4AD label.

The newest, Heretic Pride, follows several albums that might be characterized by one phrase apiece: Florida alcoholics on the verge of divorce (2003’s Tallahassee), Portland speed freaks (2004’s We Shall All Be Healed), the abusive stepfather (2005’s The Sunset Tree) and the sad one (2006’s Get Lonely). Each could be, on first listen, somewhat repulsive to a previous Mountain Goats fan; the sound of Darnielle painting himself into a corner. Usually, though, after repeated plays, Darnielle’s pinched, precise voice had soared triumphant from its seemingly wussy confines to confirm the music’s worth, just as it did when moored by analog hiss. Cellos are the new punk, it seems.

So it is with Heretic Pride, which drops the listener back into the familiar world of Darnielle’s steady collaborators— producer John Vanderslice, bassist Peter Hughes, pianist Franklin Bruno and cellist Erik Friedlander. Darnielle himself is a narrator as instantly recognizable as Raymond Carver or Charles Bukowski, his primary subject being doomed relationships, his primary architectural tool being a strident acoustic guitar. As always, he’s prone to melodrama (“I am coming home to you, with my own blood in my mouth ... if it’s the last thing that I do,” he sings on lead track “Sax Rohmer #2”); lush, writerly detail (“when we cracked the windows open, well, the air was just so sweet, we could hear the cars ten feet away, out there on the street,” from “So Desperate”); and unaccountable tenderness (“hand me your hand, let me look into your eyes, as my last chance to feel human begins to vaporize,” on “Autoclave,” the obvious single).

The first few listens reveal familiar questionable choices about the music itself. The literal Jamaican rhythms that punctuate “Sept 15 1983” (about the death of reggae singer Prince Far I, it’s a conceptual companion to 2005’s “Song For Dennis Brown”) seem out of place in the midst of an otherwise normal Darnielle strum. Likewise, the mega-peppy drums behind “Autoclave” and “Heretic Pride” (recalling fellow contrarian Mike Doughty) distract at first with their innocuous sound, as do the big Hammond swells of “New Zion.” Even in his most ornery cassette-era rulemaking, Darnielle was rarely orthodox, employing small keyboards, drum machines and even backing bands when necessary.

As one might expect, Darnielle’s voice and words center each song— on Heretic and elsewhere in his vast catalog—signifying them as Mountain Goats creations. Given his interest in finding new settings for himself (on “San Bernardino,” his singing is accompanied only by Friedlander’s cello), this is actually an affirmation: Darnielle’s sense of The Mountain Goats isn’t very different from most listeners’, despite his go-the-other-way tendencies.

Still, Darnielle’s stylistic crutches dim the overall impact. Sometimes the songs (inadvertently?) reflect one another. For example, “Sax Rohmer #2” recalls 2006’s “Half Dead” in its phrasing and word choice. “Dead languages on our tongue,” he sings on “San Bernardino”; “molasses on my tongue,” on “How To Embrace A Swamp Creature”; “jasmine on my tongue,” on “Heretic Pride” (and all this after the “scotch rich on my tongue” from 2005’s “This Year”). The repetition is distracting, but it represents one of Darnielle’s healthiest instincts—the push and pull between staying true to himself and attempting to give his voice fresh context—even if the arrangements’ only function is to fall away and let him be himself.

“How could it bear much meaning, when all it does is repeat the same themes over and over again, year in and year out, using the exact same melodic and verbal phrases and constructions?” Darnielle wrote of pop music last year in Marooned: The Next Generation of Desert Island Discs, in choosing Dionne Warwick’s Legends in the event that gunmen come to take him away. “Let a pop song run through its life cycle all the way to the end, though, and let the modes of production that governed its birth run their historical course—let them, I mean, be entirely replaced by newer technologies— and if a body still remains to be exhumed, see whether it hasn’t taken on weight and substance.”

Darnielle’s music is of an old idea: a lifelong, self-strengthening dialogue. By his very nature, he rejects the new in favor of tastefulness. He’s got a guitar, a voice and a cellist. But his idea is a modern one, too—the fully Googleable product of a contemporary polymath. WTF is an autoclave? (A machine used to sterilize surgical instruments.) WTF is proto-sci-fi writer H.P. Lovecraft doing in Brooklyn? (Bugging out over the racial diversity and getting even more grotesque.) WTF happened on September 15, 1983? (Prince Far I died in Jamaica.) WTF does the title of the album’s loveliest song reference a Swedish black metal band? (’Cause it does.) Perhaps all parts of Darnielle’s personal cosmology, these are metaphors available only to citizens of the world, feet situated in the rolling data currents.

Heretic Pride is music that would like to exist in all places at all times, equally understood as a triangulated constellation of references and as a set of disconnected proper nouns on which only the songwriter seems fixated. Ironically, the more precise Darnielle is, the more mysterious his characters’ displaced emotional power becomes. Affected? Totally. Complex and worth repeated listens? Hell yeah. After four vaguely conceptual LPs, Heretic Pride is an album in an almost literal sense—a collection of ideas, broadly bound—and one merely has to trust that Darnielle knows what he needs. That’s the thing about contrarians. They’re usually right.

Listen to "Autoclave" from Heretic Pride

"The way I talk transcribes so badly," says Mountain Goats frontman John Darnielle. "You will find out. My sentences are very, very long. and you don't know where to put any punctuation marks. I just wind up sounding stupid." This erudite-yet-modest singer-songwriter apparently has more confidence in his skills as the creator of the "heavy metal of dudes with acoustic guitars." Darnielle and his rotating cast of supporting players' devoted following has grown steadily since the release of the first Mountain Goats cassette in 1991, and its easy to see why. During our interview, through his self-deprecation, he ably discusses the latest Mountain Goats release, Heretic Pride, his forthcoming Black Sabbath book, a new collaboration with Aesop Rock and his religious worldview.

For the Mountain Goats fan who has everything: the group’s new album, Heretic Pride, debuts Feb. 19 on 4AD, and lead singer John Darnielle’s 33 1/3 book on the Black Sabbath album Master of Reality will be available on April 15.

You shouldn’t be special enough to have either one yet, though you can download a track from Pride ("Sax Rohmer #1"), or request a sample from the book at sabbathsampler@yahoo.com (hat tip, Pitchfork).

According to the book description, "John Darnielle describes Master of Reality in the voice of a fifteen-year-old boy being held in an adolescent psychiatric center in southern California in 1985. The narrator explains Black Sabbath like an emissary from an alien race describing his culture to his captors: passionately, patiently, and lovingly. This album has a genuinely remarkable historical status: as a touchstone for the directionless, and as a common coin for young men and women who felt shut out of the broader cultural economy."

Amazon.com says it's 114 pages long, and should be bought with Nick Drake's Pink Moon for a discounted combined price of $17.52. Or, you could use your extra money for shows.

Here are some dates to coincide with the new material:

February
19 - Anchorage, Alaska @ Wendy Williamson Auditorium*
22 - Vancouver, B.C. @ Richard's on Richards*
23 - Seattle, Wash. @, Neumos*
25 - Portland, Ore. @ Doug Fir Lounge*
26 - Portland, Ore. @ Doug Fir Lounge*
27 - Eugene, Ore. @ WOW Hall*
29 - San Francisco, Calif. @ Bimbo's*

March
1 - San Francisco, Calif. @ the Independent
2 - San Francisco, Calif. @ Bottom of the Hill (matinee)
4 - Los Angeles, Calif. @ the Troubadour*
5 - Los Angeles, Calif. @ the Troubadour*
13 - Northampton, Mass. @ Pearl Street^
14 - Boston, Mass. @ Museum of Fine Arts^
15 - Boston, Mass. @ The Middle East ^
18 - New York, N.Y. @ Webster Hall ^
19 - Brooklyn, N.Y. @ Music Hall of Williamsburg ^
20 - Philadelphia, Pa. @ First Unitarian ^
22 - Washington, D.C. @ The Black Cat^

*w/ Jeffrey Lewis and the Jitters
^w/ the Moaners

It's been more than a year since The Mountain Goats' last album came out, which in John Darnielle's wildly prolific world is quite some time. But the band, as much as it is a band, laid out its plans for the next album on its website earlier today. The album, titled Heretic Pride, will be out on February 19 next year. Why not release it now?

"We are really excited about this album, and we wish it were out right now, but there is a law against releasing albums in December unless you are Queen," read the website entry. "Any album you see released in December is actually by Queen, no matter what it says on the cover. Then in January everybody is recovering from having listened to too much Queen. Hence, February. See you then!"

Uhh... sure, whatever you say.

The band also released Heretic Pride's tracklisting:

1. Sax Rohmer #1
2. San Bernardino
3. Heretic Pride
4. Autoclave
5. New Zion
6. So Desperate
7. In the Craters on the Moon
8. Lovecraft in Brooklyn
9. Tianchi Lake
10. How to Embrace a Swamp Creature
11. Marduk T-Shirt Men's Room Incident
12. Sept 15 1983
13. Michael Myers Resplendent

The album will feature artwork by Vaughan Oliver and is produced by Scott Solter and John Vanderslice, who together have worked on the Goats' last three albums. More interesting, it features guest "personnel" in the form of St. Vincent's Annie Clark, Superchunk's Jon Wurster and the Bright Mountain Choir.

In the meantime, fans can get their Mountain Goats fix at their live shows these next two months:

November
29 - New York, NY @ Knitting Factory

December
8 - London, England @ Union Chapel
9 - Manchester, England @ Moho Live
10 - Glasgow, Scotland @ Oran Mor

Related links:
Mountain-Goats.com
Paste feature on The Mountain Goats
Paste review: We Shall All Be Healed

Got news tips for Paste? Email news@pastemagazine.com.

The Mountain Goats’ approach has changed very little since 1995. That’s to say, singer-songwriter John Darnielle’s approach has changed very little. In 12 releases—three 12-inches, three singles compilations, an EP, and five full-length albums—the songs have remained doggedly simple. The voice is still nasal, the lyrics sardonically humorous, and the accompaniment still basically four-chord, guitar-strummed pop with sampled voices and noises. Overall the band’s style still sounds like a four-track demo, hastily recorded, giving the ever-important impression of having been discovered by you alone, somewhere in the back of a used cassette bin at a college-town record store.

The new album fits neatly in the catalog, building ever so slightly on the achievement of Tallahassee (2001). It’s not quite as polished; Tallahassee marked a sharp departure from the lo-fi idealism of previous Mountain Goats music, and We Shall All Be Healed, especially in songs like “Quito” and “Home Again Garden Grove,” takes a step backward toward the hissing melancholy of Coroner’s Gambit (1999). But Darnielle and company seem to have learned it’s okay to pluck strings instead of simply strumming them, to embellish with other instruments. The hammered dulcimer on “Slow West Vultures” is gorgeous. The spacey bridge on “Cotton” is a Beatlesque cascade of instruments and sounds. The violin on “Linda Blair Was Born Innocent,” in all its subtlety, really draws out the sadness in the song. It’s reminiscent of Fables of the Reconstruction-era R.E.M.— songs like “Wendell Gee” and “(Don’t Go Back To) Rockville.”

There’s increasingly little pretentiousness in the band’s work and Darnielle’s lyrical skills are also solidifying. Most of the songs on We Shall All Be Healed are built around images, vignettes, pieces of his life—“sordid little scenes,” as he calls them in “The Young Thousands.” They’re usually sharp memories, emotional fragments made poignant through moral irony. Beautiful things, about which one would normally wax a bit nostalgic, often belie a deeply evil, sometimes apocalyptic twist. We Shall All Be Healed begins with a scene familiar to anyone of Darnielle’s generation and younger: “We are what we are / Get in the goddamn car / Smiling faces flawlessly rehearsed / We are sleek and beautiful / We are cursed.” Following these words is the sound of crystal shattering.

None of this is exactly new territory for Darnielle, but there’s a new level of emotional honesty. I get the sense, listening to the scene described in “Palmcorder Yajna,” that Darnielle may have actually been there: “Holt Boulevard, / between Gary and White / hooked up with some friends at the Travelodge / set ourselves up for the night.” This is not a purely metaphorical place, but rather a Big Chill living-room scene for the slacker generation. “Send somebody out for soda, / Comb through the carpet for clues. / Reflective tape on our sweatpants, / Big holes in our shoes. / Every couple minutes / Someone says he can’t stand it anymore.” Again, nostalgia shot through with a deep sense of failure. And maybe some substance abuse. The song ends with an unforgettable information-age image: “If anybody comes into our room when we’re asleep / I hope they incinerate everybody in it. / And I dreamt / Of a factory / where they manufactured what I needed / Using shiny new machines.”

But if you buy We Shall All Be Healed, you won’t have all the info I have because the promotional CD came with a letter of introduction. I feel a little guilty about not mentioning this earlier, because it explains the album’s concept. “OK, so one day there’s a bunch of people sitting in a motel room, listening to Merciful Fate’s Don’t Break the Oath on a boombox whose woofers are completely shot,” it begins. “It’s a ground floor room, and the blinds aren’t exactly what they used to be….” It goes on to describe a woman on “staggering quantities of methamphetamine,” one of a group of friends who “are probably dead or in jail by now.” These are all, honest to God, “people John used to know,” and “all of the songs on the enclosed album are based” on them. It seems as though Darnielle has spent much of his prolific outburst of songwriting dealing with these friends and circumstances tangentially, and now he’s coming out and saying it.

It’s hard to say whether The Mountain Goats’ popularity is increasing or not. True, they’ve developed a severely loyal cult following; one of their out-of-print recordings is available on Half.com for $79. But their style can be alienating. “I like the stuff, in theory,” an audiophile friend recently emailed me; “I just can’t take the guy’s voice for more than forty seconds.”

Whatever the case, it’s hard to find a band today that matches The Mountain Goats’ level of literary and moral intensity. To me, they are a version of R.E.M. in which there’s less self-consciousness and the lyrics actually make sense. There’s no mincing words with Darnielle, no art for art’s sake. He expresses purpose again and again—you can hear it at the beginning of “Cotton.”

This song is for the rats

who hurled themselves into the ocean

when they saw that the explosives in the

cargo hold

were just about to blow.

This song is for the soil

toxic clear down to the bedrock

where nothing of consequence can grow.

Drop your seeds there, let them go,

let them all go

These songs are about people, people in conflict, people in a compromised environment, people with low-paying jobs and addictions, people whom Darnielle fearlessly but compassionately characterizes. In fact, they are songs about us.