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.