headlessparrot's Full Review: Heretic Pride by The Mountain Goats
The Mountain Goats – the Mountain Goats being, more or less, John Darnielle and whomever he has decided to surround himself with on any given day – are not a band that you want to become enamoured with. At least not if you value your free time, given that Darnielle’s body of work dates back to 1991, and encompasses (according to Wikipedia) some sixteen full-length albums and twenty-four EPs, the bulk of which is extraordinarily difficult to obtain. Which means, more or less, that forming a well-reasoned, contextual understanding of the Mountain Goats’ recording career is – at best – rather futile. So I’ll leave to one more capable (and with more free time) than myself the task of constructing a critical narrative that adequately explains Darnielle’s predilection for recorded sound while situating it thoughtfully within the canon.
If there is one advantage for a potential Goats surveyor, it’s that Darnielle’s career has been pretty consistent. As best as I understand it, here is the Cliff Notes: the Mountain Goats are probably best classified as some variant of highly literary folk rock, and that categorization has never much changed. If anything has changed, it’s in the production: the early half of the Goats’ catalogue is decidedly low fidelity, presumably to turn the focus toward Darnielle’s wonderfully precise lyricism. However, at some point – in the early aughts, fuelled (I gather) in part by the appearance of regular producer John Vanderslice – he shifted gears, and adopted a (moderately) more listener friendly sound.
A side effect of my unwillingness to comb through seventeen years of CDs, vinyl, and cassettes is that it’s likewise challenging to form a well-reasoned, contextual understanding of Heretic Pride, Darnielle’s most recent release. I won’t try to. I can’t situate Heretic Pride in the grand scheme of his prodigious career. So instead, I’ll merely observe that I really, really like it, completely independently of the contextual baggage that it might (or might not) carry. I did at least make an effort to listen to its immediate predecessors (Get Lonely and The Sunset Tree), and came to the conclusion that I prefer Heretic Pride to both. Take from that what you will, with one caveat: that my half-hearted research has told me that any two Mountain Goats records from the same era (“lo-fi” and “hi-fi,” respectively), selected completely at random, will probably sound quite similar to one another. In many ways, this is less a review of Heretic Pride, then, than it is of any (or all) Mountain Goats album(s). It’s entirely possible, based on my cursory examination of Darnielle’s discography, that you only need one Mountain Goats record – the sound doesn’t much change, and the songs don’t much change (in fact, Heretic Pride’s best moment, musically speaking, was arranged and played by a contributor). Epinioner voxpoptart was more or less dead on when he suggested that “On strictly musical grounds, I might have been happy with exactly one Mountain Goats album. It was already clear that John Darnielle mainly writes just two kinds of songs: graceful, pretty folk songs and fiercely strummed, elliptical rants.” The catch is that he liked both immensely. For what it’s worth, so do I.
The only thing that ever really changes are his words. But what words! If Darnielle can be criticized for existing perpetually in his personal comfort zone of soft-or-hard-strummed folk guitars and yelping, nasal vocals (and I think he deservedly can, though perhaps ‘criticized’ is too harsh a word), he also deserves an enormous amount of credit for his lyrics, which are some of the best in modern (in this case, not-so) popular music: literary, self-referential, deeply personal, obtuse yet accessible, thoughtful and compelling. They’re perhaps more surprising given Darnielle’s own musical tastes (made evident by his personal webzine, Last Plane to Jakarta), which skew toward (amongst more “respectable” fare) mainstream hip-hop and contemporary death metal. Or maybe it’s just surprising because people like myself want to read something into the music tastes of others. In any case, if there is an argument for owning more than one Mountain Goats album (and I suspect there is, but my packrat-like music collection is maybe not the best indicator of whether this is actually true), it is – similar to the appeal of the Weakerthans’ John K. Samson – mostly just to hear the careful intricacies of his taut lyrical narratives. In other words, picking your favourite Mountain Goats album is less like picking your favourite Beatles record than it is like picking your favourite Faulkner novel (I might have said Nabokov, but Darnielle does have a propensity for the Gothic imagery and decaying, reckless lives that Faulkner wrote so well).
The comparison to Nabokov would be especially apt here though, because half the fun of Heretic Pride’s lyrical dexterity is in reading between the lines – identifying intertextuality and catching careful references to arrive at meaning. That all copies of Heretic Pride weren’t packaged with its press kit, in fact – a three-page comic book (written by Darnielle, drawn by Jeffrey Lewis) that serves as an excellent guidebook for tracking down the conceptual grounding behind some of the album’s eccentricities – is maybe my biggest criticism of Heretic Pride. Many of its allusions, of course, are plainly apparent (“Sax Rohmer #1,” in reference to the British author of pulp fiction, “Michael Myers Resplendent” name checks the Halloween villain), but others are less obvious. The interesting thing is that these references aren’t just made for the sake of referentiality, or to indicate that a song is about that which it references: rather, the careful sprinkling of names and dates and locations is a jumping off point for a more thorough interpretation of Heretic Pride’s songs. Album opener “Sax Rohmer #1,” for example is not actually about the titular author, but is rather a taut, compelling narrative in the vein of early twentieth century pulp fiction that Rohmer did write, triumphantly capturing the tense emotion and sense of inevitability that are the genre’s hallmarks – the added “#1,” I gathered, a sly reference to the numbered sequencing of comic books, which feature the same kind of heightened narrative action. Interestingly, Darnielle also seems to find creative inspiration in a world of objectionable ideas: Rohmer, he readily admits, was almost hilariously racist (Rohmer is best known, in fact, for the racially charged caricature of a villain that is Fu Manchu), while “Lovecraft in Brooklyn” takes its cue from H.P. Lovecraft’s legendary xenophobia. Darnielle’s talent here comes in his incredible ability to find intellectual insight in otherwise uncomfortable, objectionable territory.
Even the songs that don’t feature this kind of connect-the-dots topicality are remarkably compelling: “San Bernardino,” Darnielle says, is a careful yarn about an unwed couple giving birth to a child in a cheap motel outside the title city, while “So Desperate” is described as “a love song about people who’re involved with each other when they probably shouldn’t be.” What is remarkable about these moments – and about Heretic Pride as a whole – is the pressing sense of time and place apparent in these sketches. Darnielle himself observes that he has “a sort of religious awe for geography,” and this whole set of songs seems to thrive with the life of locales in which they were penned (the espionage menace of “Sax Rohmer #1,” to return to that example, is made even more tense by the claustrophobic imposition of Darnielle’s “cave-like office” in Durham, North Carolina). Perhaps more interesting is the way that, even when dabbling with conventional themes – see “So Desperate” – Darnielle manages to seed truly astute observation (the central relationship of “So Desperate” is less about how the two parties are wrong for one another than it is about how “the heat and shame of the whole situation is like a snake eating its own tail, except the tail grows faster than he can eat it”).
And OK, maybe it isn’t entirely fair to say that Darnielle has been using the same backing track for the past fifteen years, because Heretic Pride does show signs of musical vision. It isn’t leaps and bounds growth over a catalogue of quiet-slash-loud acoustic contemplation, but it sounds – dare I say – orchestral compared to every other Mountain Goats record I’ve heard; most noticeable, arguably, on the gauzy strings of “San Bernardino” and the spacey synth underpinning of “Autoclave.” Though I guess it should be noted that the musicality of “San Bernardino” owes mostly to contributor Eric Friedlander’s arrangement (Darnielle comments in the press release that “he plays everything on this track, I just sing and listen,” no doubt a testament to the fact that he has nothing to do with the arrangement’s tender beauty). Still, it’s remarkably infectious for such a self-consciously difficult artist, something that’s as jarring as it is compelling; Darnielle has not made a career out of accessibility, but either he has learned something from fifteen years of conscious near-tunelessness, or producer-collaborator John Vanderslice has willed a sense of melody and musical dynamism into Heretic Pride. Vanderslice is known both for a respectable solo career, and for his well-known all-analog recording studio, which has been home to acts including Death Cab for Cutie, Okkervil River, and Spoon. That he received a producer credit on Spoon’s Gimme Fiction suggests Vanderslice might be at least partly behind the Goats’ high-fidelity, quasi-orchestral regenesis. Especially given the fact that either he and/or his engineer, Scott Solter has helmed every Mountain Goats LP since 2004’s We Shall All Be Healed.
While “Sax Rohmer #1” sets the tone for Heretic Pride – tense, throbbing, but mostly just romantic, in a twisted film noir kind of way – there’s little let-up for forty minutes afterward. The title track – “title unconsciously cribbed,” explains Darnielle, from the lyrics of a song by a death metal band – is a sort of persecution fantasy (“But really, who can even say the word ‘fantasy’ without flinching?”), framed by the jerky interplay of guitar, piano, and sluggish drums that finds its narrator taking exquisite pleasure in being dragged from his home and executed. “Heretic Pride” finds its stride in the narrator’s observation of precise detail, for example the taste of jasmine on his tongue, and the faint smell of honeysuckle on the breeze.
“Autoclave,” however, is the hands-down highlight of Heretic Pride. Propelled by a more pensive variation on the melody of “Sax Rohmer #1,” Darnielle explains the origins of “Autoclave” thusly:
“I was in Alaska when I read about the discovery of a life form that can not only survive an autoclave (the instrument used for sterilizing surgical instruments; it’s supposed to kill any and all bacteria on the tools), but which seems to really enjoy the autoclave scene: at temperatures fatal to all other life forms, this bacteria would begin to breed.”
What I love about “Autoclave” is its cleverness: the song transforms Darnielle’s inspiration into an elaborate metaphor for the human heart (the chorus simply repeats “My heart’s an autoclave”), which sounds positively heartbreaking until we consider the significance of his story. If his narrator’s heart is in fact an autoclave, then the existence of this life form is not a danger (as it is in real life), but rather a small measure of hope, for even the most isolated heart. The result is that an otherwise grim melodrama is shaded with a measure of cautious optimism. OK, maybe it’s kind of obvious – but it’s such a self-aware departure from “my heart is a red rose” that it deserves all the credit it gets.
“Lovecraft in Brooklyn” takes its inspiration from the most fertile period of H.P. Lovecraft’s career, which also happened to be his most troubling: “Lovecraft moved to Brooklyn,” Darnielle writes, “to be with the woman he loved. He had never really seen any people who were not white folks from Massachusetts. Immigrants were spilling into Brooklyn from the four corners of the globe. Lovecraft’s xenophobia during his time in Brooklyn resulted in some of the weirdest, darkest images in all of American literature.” The song is not directly about this historical period, or even about Lovecraft at all per se, but instead uses his paranoia to construct its own internal tension around a manic character who feels “like Lovecraft in Brooklyn” (Darnielle observes that Lovecraft’s “inclination toward a general suspicion of anything that’s alive is pretty fertile ground”). Buoyed by its spastic musical electricity, and revealing the subtle extent of death metal’s influence on the Mountain Goats’ prodigious output, “Lovecraft in Brooklyn” may be one of the best musical personification of paranoia ever set to tape.
“Sept 15 1983” is ostensibly about the death of reggae artist Prince Far I – the titular date is that of his murder – and appropriately features some reggae flourishes. Or, at least, reggae viewed through Darnielle’s twisted lens, amounting to some quite shakers, a laidback quasi-island rhythm and some punchy organ fills. Heretic Pride closes with “Michael Myers Resplendent,” coming full circle with the cryptic observation that “this song is like ‘Sax Rohmer #1’ if the narrator had given up on ever actually getting home.” It’s a tortured arrangement that – like “San Bernardino” before it – eschews the low-key for the dramatic; in this case featuring a gorgeous mash of effortless piano and gossamer strings, held together by its vulgar kick-drum fills.
The apparent push-pull relationship between Vanderslice and Darnielle, for four albums now, can’t be classified as anything less than a definitive triumph. I suppose that Heretic Pride could be dismissed as the band’s pop record, if they’re truly capable of actually making one (and that I will, accordingly, be deriding for favouring the band’s pop record). Or that it’s a remarkably meta exercise, marrying the conventional with the obtuse (which, if true, draws favourable comparisons to the aforementioned Weakerthans, whose album Reconstruction Site similarly weds high and low culture, though certainly in a more deliberate manner), in which case I maintain my tenuous credibility. Or (and this is the one that I’m holding out for) that Heretic Pride marks the next in a series of baby steps toward immaculate production and beautiful arrangements which (one figures) simply must be locked up somewhere in Darnielle’s head. Melodies that would sound right at home in modern pop songwriting are cleverly subverted when framed within the context of Darnielle’s decidedly unconventional approach to the guitar – not to mention his yelping, hyperactive voice.
The whole affair, in fact, seems like a perfect specimen of the organic, rich, and raw sound – “sloppy hi-fi” as he has termed it – that has become the Vanderslice’s bread and butter. It sounds almost like the demo tape of a more polished band, containing precise sketches of the songs that will become their masterpiece. What’s great about Heretic Pride is that in no way is this as a criticism. The Mountain Goats, here, have masterfully combined polished, nuanced songs with an intimate, haphazard earnestness that’s affecting and engaging. Subsequently, Heretic Pride is a pretty amazing experience. It’s also, at the very least, an early (admittedly dark-horse) contender for the best of 2008, even if my lack of contextual appreciation dooms me to making gross miscalculations about the life and times of John Darnielle.
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