CD Review: The Mountain Goats' Heretic Pride

The Mountain Goats are known for painting pictures. Frontman John Darnielle is more a poet than a musician, and it shows—the lyrics are cryptic and the melodies are simple, and yet Darnielle manages to get away with it all almost exclusively thanks to the emotion put into each song as he describes various scenarios, revealing the beauty in all of them.

The album is a mellow one, mostly standard acoustic Goats fare, dealing with peculiar characters in or out of some kind of love. “Some kid in a Marcus Allen jersey/ Asks me for a cigarette/ Companionship is where you find it/ So I take what I can get,” Darnielle sings on the only electric track, “Lovecraft in Brooklyn”, about H.P. Lovecraft in, yes, Brooklyn. “In the Craters on the Moon” paints more of a picture than it tells a story of people huddling in a smoky room during “the declining years/ of the long war.” The band has often been more about painting pictures than telling stories, and the pictures here are as vivid, clever and powerful as ever, citing such obscure metaphors as comparing a heart to an autoclave or a nameless girl in a Marduk t-shirt who’s “Slumped up against the sink,/ Hair plastered to her cheeks.”

In the album's more beautiful moments, Darnielle needs hardly any instruments to back him up. “So Desperate” proves this; there is a faint plucking of strings in the background, but it is Darnielle and his lyrics in the spotlight, as he sings in an almost pained falsetto about two lovers in a car: “I felt so desperate/ In your arms.” A steamed up car has scarcely seemed so romantic.

Whether the images he paints are really cause for pain, however, isn’t really for him to decide; the album is an open invitation for interpretation and enjoyment. Rather than escape emotions, Darnielle embraces them, running headfirst into the reality of all kinds of day-to-day lives, be it two lovers holding one another in a car or an anonymous girl in a bathroom. After all, the names aren’t too important; it’s the images that matter.