The Mountain Goats Heretic Pride WB rating out of 100

The Mountain Goats are like one of those friends you make slowly and unexpectedly. You know the kind – when you first meet, maybe in primary school, you hate each other. In a few years this mellows to a state of mutual ignoring. By sometime in high school you start to tolerate each other, maybe even have a bit of polite conversation now and then. Perhaps you’re forced together by circumstance, some shared class filled with a whole bunch of fuckwits. However it happens, you talk a little more and a little more. And somehow, towards the end of the whole educational enterprise, you suddenly realize you’re actually good friends with this person. How it happened you’ll never really know, but there it is and there’s nothing you can do. As we’ve discussed before in a WB editorial, the Mountain Goats can start out shitting you up the wall, and end up being much loved. They take some getting used to, but once they’ve got you, you’d bare-knuckle fight Amanda Vanstone in a doughnut factory just to see them play. Many of their albums are the same, garnering only moderate praise from you at first, but creeping up and planting their hooks in your heart before you really know what’s happened. Heretic Pride is another case in point, seeming somewhat modest at first before a few listens reveal it as what it is: a sparkling addition to the Mountain Goats canon.

The best thing about the Mountain Goats is that we never have to wait too long for another album. Songwriter and founder John Darnielle, supported since 2002 by bassist Peter Hughes, churns out songs at a prolific rate. Since All Hail West Texas was released in 2002, we’ve had a new Goats album at an average of one a year, and the quality has never really suffered. Heretic Pride is the Goats at their best, trampling underfoot the slight disappointment of 2006’s Get Lonely to return to the heights of their crowning triptych of albums – We Shall All Be Healed, Tallahassee, and The Sunset Tree. For those familiar with him, the album is distinctively Darnielle’s work, but there are enough subtle variations to ensure that it doesn’t sound like a rehash. In terms of content it is a varied selection, rather than following the concept album mould that Darnielle used so successfully for Tallahassee and The Sunset Tree. But it is much more than just a random selection of suitably Goatish songs. They are placed with great deliberation. They work together, complement one another, and in the end give the entire collection a perfect balance.

It’s obvious from the opening track that Darnielle is in a rockier mood than he was for Get Lonely. ‘Sax Rohmer # 1’ has a gently driving guitar line that leads up to a bigger, typically Darnielle chorus: “And I am coming home to you/With my own blood in my mouth/And I am coming home to you/If it’s the last thing that I do.” It’s belted out with a gusto we haven’t heard since the closing lines of ‘Broom People’. What becomes apparent as you listen through the album is that ‘Sax Rohmer’ forms part of the structure upon which the album is built. A number of ballsy tracks are interspersed throughout Heretic Pride, acting as a form of punctuation. Between them, the softer songs rest comfortably and provide necessary downtime. Misjudging this arrangement could have made the album dull; instead it is perfectly paced. Early on, ‘Sax Rohmer’ speaks to the similarly up-tempo title track at number three. But they are separated by the goose-down softness of ‘San Bernadino’. ‘Craters on the Moon’ and ‘Lovecraft in Brooklyn’ are twin pillars of intensity in the middle of the album, but are bracketed by the two gentlest songs, ‘So Desperate’ and ‘Tianchi Lake’; full marks for the arrangement.

The real joy of this album is in the content of the songs, and the way this content is supported by the music. How much is Hughes’ influence is unclear, but the Goats have mastered their fuller studio sound, using guest musicians to tie in drums, cello, keyboards, and even at one point a little choral glissando amongst the backing vocals. It will be interesting to see how Hughes tries to convey all of these extra elements next time the Goats tour. On the record, his bass is understated but authoritative, and Darnielle’s work with the guitar seems to have kicked up a notch. ‘San Bernardino’ gets its softness from light guitar picking and a luscious cello accompaniment, a softness which matches its subject perfectly. ‘New Zion’ opens with drums, never really a feature of Goats music to date, and uses them to deftly raise and lower the intensity as required. ‘Craters on the Moon’ has its harsh content reflected as the cello becomes strident, Erik Friedlander pressing his bow hard against the strings to make the horsehair scrape. ‘Lovecraft in Brooklyn’ kicks in with a grand New York punk-strut, while the lyrics remain pure Darnielle: “Gonna be too hot to breathe today/Everybody’s out here on the streets/Somebody’s opened up a fire hydrant/Cold water rushing out in sheets.”

His vocals on ‘So Desperate’ add another dimension to his abilities, and are another aspect of this album that requires patience. He wavers in a high register, eventually ending with an almost falsetto that’s nigh-on painful (for him and for us). At first this style seems annoying, but then it begins to make sense. The song is about one of Darnielle’s specialties, an imploding relationship: “Through the warm radio static/I couldn’t hear my stage directions/And the fog on the windshield/Obscured our sad reflections.” In this context, the vocals show the singer strained, tearing, stretched to breaking point. Darnielle has never seemed this vulnerable, except perhaps on The Sunset Tree’s ‘Dinu Lipatti’s Bones’. Finally, ‘Marduk T-Shirt Men’s Room Incident’ is one of the most tenderly beautiful Mountain Goats songs ever, its sinister title and lyrics floating amongst angelic backing vocals, sounding like a crossbreed between a gospel choir and some of the soundscaping of Low.

The music is just what it should be – the best possible means of framing Darnielle’s lyrics. Something which should not to be underestimated is the fact that you can actually understand what Darnielle is saying. So many vocalists just slur their lyrics into the mic, or let them be swamped by walls of guitar – anyone who’s tried to figure out what the fuck Eddie Vedder is talking about will know what I mean. And usually the slurring is just because they have shit irrelevant lyrics. Darnielle doesn’t, so he takes care to make sure we can hear them. As ever, it is his lyrics that make the Mountain Goats stand out so far from their contemporaries. There is wit, humour, intellect, depth and a vast amount of human warmth. The gorgeous ‘San Bernadino’ is all mystical eloquence: “And flaming swords may guard the Garden of Eden/But we consulted maps from earlier days/Dead languages on our tongues/Holding on to our last hope.” ‘How to Embrace a Swamp Creature’ displays Darnielle’s knack for conveying complex, layered images in the simplest fashion: “Alone with your bathroom mirror/Try to get my head straight/Breathe on the glass and wait for it to clear/ – Clean slate.”

But above all there is the sentiment that defines the Mountain Goats: a kind of triumphant despair, a jubilation in desperation, a sense that the whole world is coming apart around us and all we can do is sing as lustily as we can while we enjoy the show. ‘Sax Rohmer’ is brutal: “And a rabbit gives up somewhere/And a dozen hawks descend/Every moment leads toward its own sad end.” ‘Lovecraft in Brooklyn’ is cataclysmic: “I cast my gaze toward the pavement/Too many bloodstains on the ground/Rhode Island drops into the ocean/No place to call home anymore.” Props to Darnielle, too, for use of the vernacular ‘like’ in a song: “Woke up afraid of my own shadow/Like, genuinely afraid/Heading for the pawnshop/To buy myself a switchblade.” In ‘Craters on the Moon’ he is “Blind as the rats in the moonlight/Too far from the shore/in the declining years of the long war.” Darnielle’s vocal performance on all three tracks is exemplary, consistently cranking up the intensity, with ‘Craters’ the best of the three by a whisker. All these songs express the same savage enjoyment of despair, the same sick elation at imminent destruction.

But the lyrical centrepiece of the record, in this regard and in all others, is ‘Heretic Pride’. How Darnielle can write so compellingly on such eclectic topics is staggering. Here he sings the story of an unnamed protagonist being burned at the stake by villagers – and somehow he pulls it off. Again, the song is uplifting and triumphant, despite technically being a funeral dirge. It’s sad, it’s beautiful, and it has that same Goats ‘fuck you’ to fate. The images are never laboured, and are brought into sharp relief by those they’re placed next to: “And the people all come out to cheer/Rocks from the pathway break my skin/And there’s honeysuckle on the faint breeze today/With every breath I’m drawing in.” Eventually the character, as Darnielle has so often done, embraces the hand dealt to him: “I waited so long and now I taste jasmine on my tongue/And I feel so proud to be alive/And I feel so proud when the reckoning arrives.” This is extraordinary songwriting, extraordinary storytelling and extraordinary faithfulness to a single idea across different songs and different albums. It may not be too much of a stretch to tie this sentiment to a simpler line from ‘Tianchi Lake’: “And then the water sought its course again, the way that waters will.” Can’t fight fate, he seems to be saying, and we’re all screwed anyway. So pour a drink and head to the observation deck when the ship starts to go down.

Heretic Pride is more than just the continuation of a musical tradition. At first listen it can sound similar to past Goats records, and you wonder if the band is making progress. But once the subtler workings within this album are allowed to reveal themselves, its real nature becomes clear. It’s a consistent part of the Mountain Goats’ musical practice, but it’s also a distinct entity and a great album in its own right. It sits as comfortably alone as it does within the canon of Darnielle’s work. Having become more familiar with the way the Mountain Goats’ music works, there are songs on this album that I know will grow in stature in my mind as time goes on. And there are songs which have stamped a pretty big footprint there already. While there may be some who can match him, there is no better lyricist in music today than John Darnielle. And in collaboration with Peter Hughes and producers Scott Solter and John Vanderslice, Darnielle’s musical arrangements, singing, and guitar work are only getting better. It may take newcomers a while to get used to his voice and his lyrical style. But once they’re there, they’ll know it was worth the effort. This is an absolutely first-class release, full of potency, thoughtfulness, and crackling spitting energy. The Goats may be friends made slowly and unexpectedly, but I don’t know where we’d be without them today. Long may their prolific streak continue.