The Mountain Goats Seek Revenge on Bleed Out
The group’s 21st album is a collection of songs about vengeance
It’s tempting to equate The Mountain Goats’ best songs with the most personal ones that John Darnielle has written. Take The Sunset Tree: Widely viewed as a standout effort, the group’s 2005 album was a wrenching, deeply compelling collection of songs about the physical abuse Darnielle experienced as a child. Yet the reason those songs connected with listeners wasn’t that they offered a window into a traumatic childhood, but rather the feeling of catharsis they represented. When Darnielle sang, “I am going to make it through this year if it kills me,” on “This Year,” he tapped into a universal sentiment.
He does something similar on The Mountain Goats’ new album, Bleed Out, though the context is vastly different. It’s an album about vengeance, but not in an autobiographical way. Instead of continually dredging up horrors from his youth, Darnielle has moved toward more broadly thematic material, on albums built around Bible verses, professional wrestling and goth culture, among other topics. The dozen songs on Bleed Out are personal only in the sense that Darnielle wrote them after spending a good chunk of that first pandemic winter on his couch in North Carolina, immersed in action movies. Revenge is usually the central plot point of those movies as unlikely heroes spill plenty of blood in a quest for redemption—the ultimate catharsis.
“In these movies and elsewhere, it’s such a dearly held trope, when in fact, I don’t think anybody really exacts much revenge in this life at all,” Darnielle says in the press notes for the album. “Because we all know that revenge is bullshit, right? The Greeks knew this. It’s never a zero-sum game. And yet the idea is so delicious, you can’t get enough of it.”
That’s the idea at the heart of the dozen new songs on Bleed Out. Darnielle sketches out action epics in miniature, capturing the clichés of the genre with wit, a vivid imagination and no small measure of pent-up energy. He sings with clenched-jaw determination on opening track “Training Montage,” which evokes exactly what the title describes: a guy in a basement preparing himself to hit back. “I’m doing this for revenge,” Darnielle announces on the chorus, just in case his narrator’s motives seemed hazy.