Caught in the Carousel

The Mountain Goats

Heretic Pride
4AD

A friend of mine who is a self-labeled "recovering Calvinist" once joked that he'd definitely attend services again if they were led by "Pastor" John Darnielle. It's hard to discern whether the mastermind behind the Mountain Goats is Reverend or just reverent—and that's probably part of his appeal. Few other non-evangelical singers would name a song "I Corinthians 13:8-10," or quote directly from the Book of Joel without being snide. But the raw specificity of Darnielle's unflinching narrative details, over successive albums, repeatedly suggests that redemption isn't issued by a divine entity in the afterlife: it happens on Earth. When a five-year-old figures out that turning up the volume on a record player gives him the power to drown out the yelling of his abusive stepfather: redemption. When quiet Texans welcome destitute immigrants from Asia and Mexico into their community: redemption. And, while no evangelical singer would be caught dead writing a revenge song containing refrains like, "I hope you die / I hope we both die" or "hail Satan! / Hail Satan tonight! / Hail Satan! / Hail, hail," Darnielle, with the able assistance of bassist and backing vocalist Peter Hughes, can make such chants sound almost pure, earnest, and like redemption.

Continuing in this tradition, the Mountain Goats confront religion both overtly and covertly on their new collection, Heretic Pride. Some of the songs directly embody and address organized religion. "New Zion" describes "everybody on his best behavior, listening for the altar call," while "Sept 15 1983," is a devout rewriting of the death of musical producer Prince Far I (a.k.a. Michael James Williams). In earlier work by the Mountain Goats, Darnielle often signals religious allusions to the listener by setting such references apart in refrains or song titles; "New Zion" and "Sept 15 1983" contain snippets of almost church-style organ that provide similar hints. Both songs suggest that living life by a passed-down set of tenets isn't always all it's cracked up to be. "Try, try your whole life," Darnielle sings in "Sept 15 1983," "to be righteous and be good / wind up on your own floor / choking on blood." The conclusion, in "New Zion," is that "the little bit of faith we had once... it got burned up in the Great Fire / reassembling itself slowly but surely." So where do faith and redemption occur? In the title track, "Heretic Pride," the narrator—a heretic dragged out into town for a public beating and/or stoning—embraces his fate and maintains his beliefs. "Transfiguration's gonna come for me at last / and I will burn hotter than the sun / I've waited so long," sings Darnielle—then, adding a signature narrative detail, continues, "and now I taste jasmine on my tongue." Though the redemption hoped for by the heretic is afterlife—and not Earth-oriented, it, in typical Mountain Goats fashion, occurs as a result of human battle.

But the discussion of religion on Heretic Pride is not always overt or violent: some of the songs on the album contain subtextual, complicated, and even quiet rewritings of Biblical stories. In "How To Love a Swamp Creature," Darnielle poignantly integrates images from the story of the creation and subsequent exile from Eden into a modern-day scene in a love object's apartment: "meet up with you in the kitchen, where the air is hot and dry / open up all the faucets / be fruitful and multiply / I stand where the flashing swords gleam." And "San Bernardino," though it could be about any couple leaving one town for another and having a child, contains undercurrents of the nativity story.

To tell these newer, layered stories, the Mountain Goats experiment with different narrative techniques. Though the opening track, "Sax Rohmer #1," contains the kind of tension and impetus characteristic of earlier efforts, it's no accident that the track is named for a novelist—it's one of the rare instances in which Darnielle, moving swiftly from image to image, acts as an omniscient narrator. The Mountain Goats have never shied completely away from the generic or always told the whole story, but Heretic Pride is full of the kind of jumps and omissions that lead the listener away from any clear conclusion. In almost modernist fashion, Darnielle narrates the sex scene in "So Desperate" via the fog on the car windshield; the song also contains an unaccountable time shift from day to night. "Tianchi Lake," a soft song about a monster who coexists peacefully with a village, contains such shifts as well. And the only time the listener gets an expected "close-up" of any character is in the final track, "Michael Myers Resplendent," in which the narrator appears when "ready," after spending "eight hours in my makeup chair." The message? Character is crafted.

The instrumental layering on Heretic Pride echoes the album's narrative complexity. Though John Darnielle will claim, while playing live, that he only knows three chords, one wouldn't know it from the sheer amount of stuff going on on this album. It's almost as if the tumbling piano of The Sunset Tree and the careful experiments in quiet on 2006's Get Lonely have merged to create something that's instrumentally sculpted but, on Darnielle's slower ballads, ultimately more relaxed. This plays out via the string sections, the aforementioned organ flourishes, and the careful balance of female backing vocalists: Annie Clark and Sarah Arslanian are as smooth as Rachel Ware Zooi (the band's erstwhile bassist) is scrappy. Meanwhile, Jon Wurster's versatile drumming lends variety to the album's tenser moments, leaving the listener sympathetically paranoid during "Lovecraft in Brooklyn" but bouncing along to the nearly-twee "Autoclave." Continuing a trend that began with Tallahassee, (the first album Darnielle and Hughes made together) Heretic Pride finds the Mountain Goats less raw and more studied, but as spiritual as ever.

-- Christine Fort