Mountain Goats, the brainchild of California's singer-songwriter John Darnielle, armed only of his vocals and an acoustic guitar, debuted with the cassettes
Taboo VI (Shrimper, 1991), which contains ten songs (including
Going to Alaska),
and The Hound Chronicles (Shrimper, 1992), which (depending on the verion) contains 16 or 18 songs
(including five "Going" songs, notably the original Going to Kansas,
as well as The Water Song and Lab Rat Blues).
His early repertory spans several humble recordings such as
the five-song 7" EP Songs For Petronius (Shrimper, 1992),
the five-song 7" EP Chile De Arbol (Ajax, 1993), containing Fresh Berries For You,
the eight-song 10" EP Beautiful Rat Sunset (Shrimper, 1994), recorded by a quartet, containing Itzcuintli-Totzli Days, New Star Song and Going to Maryland,
and the four-song 7" EP Philyra (Theme Park, 1994).
His chief collaborator was bassist Rachel Ware.
The ten-song cassette Transmissions From Horace (Sonic Enemy, 1993) contains Teenage World, Star Dusting, Beach House and Alpha Desperation March.
The 16-song cassette Hot Garden Stomp (Shrimper, 1993),
the six-song cassette Taking The Dative (Car In Car Disco)
the eight-song cassette Yam the King of Crops (1994)
The double-disc The Hound Chronicles/ Hot Garden Stomp (Shrimper, 2012)
collects two of the early cassettes.
Zopilote Machine (Ajax, 1994 - 3 Beads of Sweat, 2005) was his first major work, a lengthy concept about two lovers who are about to break up. Recorded on a cheap cassette recorder, it still embraces a lo-fi aesthetic. The only accompaniment is usually his guitar and sometimes the Bright Mountain Choir (Rachel Ware, Amy Piatt, Sarah Arslanian, Roseanne Lindley).
The ear-splitting droning organ of
Song For Tura Satana is the notable exception.
The sparse format makes emphatic alt-folk chants like We Have Seen The Enemy, The Black Ice Cream Song and Young Caesar 2000 sound delirious.
The effervescent Alpha Incipiens is balanced by the
almost robotic Azo Tle Nelli In Tlalticpac?.
There are honestly catchy tunes (Orange Ball Of Hate, the one-minute Alpha Sun Hat and the choir-enhanced Sinaloan Milk Snake Song) but clearly melody is not his forte.
The album contains his first "Aztec" songs (Quetzalcoatl Is Born, Quetzalcoatl Eats Plums) and Going To Georgia is the most poignant of the "Going" songs here.
The four-song EPs Songs About Fire (Cassiel, 1995) and
Songs For Peter Hughes (Sonic Sound, 1995),
dedicated to Peter Hughes of
Nothing Painted Blue,
kept waving his inner ghosts in that fiercely lonely format.
The four-song EP Orange Raja Blood Royal (Walt, 1995) marked a quantum leap forward because it featured arrangements by violinist
Alastair Galbraith:
The Only Thing I Know,
Hatha Hill and Raja Vocative fall at the border between
Sebadoh's lo-fi pop and the Palace Brothers's anemic alt-country.
The nine-song EP Nine Black Poppies (Emperor Jones, 1995), with Cubs In Five and
Stars Fell On Alabama, sounded unusually professional.
Sweden (Shrimper, 1995), another ambitious concept (19 songs), lifted him to the top of the independent singer-songwriting movement.
His traditional alt-folk survives in The Recognition Scene and
Snow Crush Killing Song
is the delicate elegy du jour,
but the album shines mostly because of the two extremes:
hummable songs like the lullaby Going To Bolivia, the male-female duet Going To Queens and
Some Swedish Trees, which is a mixture of Warren Zevon and John Denver;
and on the other hand the
songs so subdued to be hardly musical at all like the anemic Flashing Lights and the whispered Whole Wide World.
A third category contains stylistic experiments that are hard to define:
the ghostly boogie Send Me An Angel, the tense melodrama Neon Orange Glimmer Song and the lo-fi and sedated synth-pop California Song that features keyboards.
The cover of Steely Dan's FM is the low point.
Nothing For Juice (Ajax, 1996 - 3 Beads of Sweat, 2005), the last album with Ware, continues the winning streak with some of his best material but is
wildly uneven.
Waving At You overflows with pathos and tenderness.
The bluesy Alabama Nova is balanced by the dreamy Moon And Sand.
Odd moments include the
catchy and almost aggressive Going To Scotland (another male-female duet),
an electric version of his old Going To Kansas that sounds like shoegaze-pop,
the drunk guitar of Blueberry Frost,
and especially Going To Reykjavik, ghostly and almost dissonant folk-rock.
The cover this time is Robert Johnson's haunting Hellhound On My Trail.
The 16-song Full Force Galesburg (Emperor Jones, 1997) features
Alastair Galbraith and Peter Hughes (Nothing Painted Blue).
There is the usual batch of
poignant alt-folk (Maize Stalk Drinking Blood, Minnesota),
notably mutating in a flamenco-punk hybrid in New Britain,
but also
delicate and lyrical elegies like Snow Owl and Original Air-Blue Gown.
There is, mostly, a turn towards tense melodrama: West Country Dream, Down Here (folk-rock with jangling guitars) and
Weekend in Western Illinois
(gospel-ish organ and distorted guitar) are among his best sonic concoctions.
The catchy and semi-anthemic Ontario is almost mainstream.
It contains no “Going" songs.
The five-song EP New Asian Cinema (1998) contains Golden Jackal Song.
The anthologies
Protein Source Of The Future (Ajax, 1999),
Bitter Melon Farm (Ajax, 2000) and Ghana (3 Beads of Sweat, 2002)
compile early singles and rarities.
Featuring a completely new line-up behind Darnielle,
The Coroner's Gambit (Absolutely Kosher, 2001) offers the first new
material in three years, seasoned with haiku-like lyrics
("Baseballs travel further when you watch them fly")
that enhance the metaphysical quality of these gothic stories.
Family Happiness is the highlight.
All Hail West Texas (Emperor Jones, 2002) is yet another treasure chest
of witty and catchy folk-pop ditties for voice and guitar.
John Darnielle is in splendid form as he fakes a
reprise of Freewheelin'-period Bob Dylan in
The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton,
as he borrows a posture and a melody from Cat Stevens
(Riches And Wonders),
as he howls the serenade to Jenny in a tremulous tone,
The album boasts an impressive parade of tuneful vignettes, occasionally
bordering on Jonathan Richman-ian greatness (Pink And Blue,
Fall Of The Star High School Running Back),
occasionally echoing epic tones of the Sixties.
It goes to Darnielle's credit (to his guitar playing, humble albeit forceful)
that the songs do not sound spare and thin,
even though the backing band is only one instrument.
The only flaw of this album, as with all of Darnielle's albums, is that he
does not let his genius fly. Songs are truncated after two minutes, revealing
only a glimpse of what they could be in the hands of a more cunning songwriter,
stories focus on the... story, rather than soaring into metaphysical odes.
Check Blues In Dallas for evidence of what a little leeway can do.
The talent is indisputable. Give him a producer and he will become a star.
Tallahassee (4AD, 2003), a concept album about a couple and their
disintegrating relationship, where the saga begun with
Alpha Incipiens culminates,
is orchestrated with the help of
multi-instrumentalist Peter Hughes and played by a real band.
This when all but hung up the boombox whose lo-fi sound had characterized
the previous albums.
While Darnielle still serves old-fashioned folk vignettes
(Tallahassee, International Small Arms Traffic Blues) and
bluesy dirges (The House That Dripped Blood),
a more assertive style (First Few Desperate Hours)
sometimes pulsing like a Velvet Underground boogie
(Southwood Plantation Road, See America Right),
a deeper melodic content (Alpha Rats Nest),
and lightly psychedelic touches (Game Shows Touch Our Lives,
Old College Try, with echoes of Bob Dylans' Blonde On Blonde)
make it a much more accomplished collection than the previous one.
The epic pessimism of No Children
and the virulent roots-rock of Oceanographer's Choice
recall Warren Zevon.
Darnielle has finally topped his debut.
Now that Darnielle has disposed with any youthful inhibition, Mountain Goats
albums sound like proclaims of hard-fought self-determination.
Alas, We Shall All Be Healed (4AD, 2004) is also unusually un-musical:
Darnielle shouts rather than sing, and the band provides a generic loud-rock
accompaniment. There seems to be precious little integration and coherence
(and inventiveness) in the playing.
Several punkish sermons recall the Mekons or Billy Bragg.
The Quito is perhaps the best of this emphatic batch.
But it is telling that the most dramatic moment, Mole, relies on simple
declamation and sparse, psychological accompaniment;
and another highlight is the bard of Slow West Vultures,
who displays the calm existential pensiveness of a Paul Simon.
Also more successful is the closing tragicomic ode,
Triumph of Pigs That Ran Straightaway Into The Water, that shifts to
a sardonic tone.
Despite a few major additions to his canon,
Darnielle may have invested too much on the lyrics, and forgotten that
there is a difference between journalism and music.
The autobiographical concept
The Sunset Tree (4AD, 2005) is a much more sincere and heartfelt work
than its predecessor. The touching arrangements (particularly
Erik Friedlander's cello) are never overbearing, the pace is solemn without
being pompous, the melodies are simple without being trivial.
The driving piano-driven This Year and Dance Music are reminiscent of Don McLean's American Pie.
The theatrical cello-enhanced Dilaudid and the martial violin-tinged Lion's Teeth sound like arias of a Broadway musical.
Magpie evokes both medieval dances and operatic folk.
But the peak of the collaboration between songwriter and arranger are the spectral Dinu Lipatti's Bones
and the almost psychedeic Love Love Love,
two of the most atmospheric creations of Darnielle's career.
The cozy, homey tone of You Or Your Memory
and the stately tone of Hast Thou Considered The Tetrapod
do not struggle to coexist.
The album ends on a somber tone with subdued narratives like
Song For Dennis Brown and Pale Green Things.
Despite the deeply affecting stories that he relates,
traumas do not populate these songs. What emanates from them is, instead,
almost a sense of achieving inner peace.
The EP Babylon Springs (4AD, 2006) contains Sometimes I Still Feel The Bruise.
Get Lonely (4AD, 2006), featuring Franklin Bruno, Peter Hughes,
multi-instrumentalist Scott Solter, cellist Erik Friedlander and drummer Corey Fogel, continued the autobiographical strand but in a more spartan setting.
Far less cathartic, austere and shocking, this installment of Darnielle's
chronicles is devoted to rather trivial events in a rather subtle way
(Get Lonely).
After a trilogy of disturbingly autobiographic works,
John Darnielle's topics turned more extroverted on Heretic Pride (4AD, 2008),
so that the lush arrangements of the new course actually started making sense.
In The Craters on the Moon,
New Zion,
How to Embrace A Swamp Creature,
and especially
Lovecraft in Brooklyn
(replete with sobbing guitar, loping chorus, visceral shouting, dissonant sounds)
are Darnielle at his atmospheric-storytelling best,
but the most intriguing piece is Erik Friedlander's creation
San Bernadino for voice and cello.
Tuneful opener Sax Rohmer #1
and title-track Heretic Pride
even unleash a rocker's energy (not least thanks
to the rhythm section of drummer Jon Wurster and bassist Peter Hughes), but
Darnielle remains first and foremost a chronicler of private apocalypses.
The "Biblical" concept
The Life Of The World To Come (4AD, 2009), whose songs have titles
taken from the Bible, indulges in apocalyptic atmospheres and laconic tales,
sometimes penned by piano and strings instead of the usual guitar.
For a burst of emphatic and aggressive preaching in Psalms 40:2
and
a bit of uplifting pathos in the catchy serenade Genesis 30:3
(a` la Don McLean's American Pie)
one is treated to a funeral of elegiac tunes such as
Samuel 15:23
(that nonetheless hides an anthemic riff worthy of Jimi Hendrix),
Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace
and Deuteronomy 2:11,
as well as to odd rhythmic hybrids such as Hebrews 11:40,
Matthew 25:21 and Romans 10:9.
This erudite work is fascinating as a concept but less than rewarding as a
musical work.
The EP Black Pear Tree (self released, 2009) was a collaboration
between John Darnielle and Kaki King.
The EP
Moon Colony Bloodbath (self released, 2009)
was a collaboration
between John Darnielle and John Vanderslice.
John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats and Franklin Bruno of Nothing Painted Blue joined forces in Extra Glenns and released Martial Arts Weekend (Absolutely Kosher, 2002).
Years later they changed name in Extra Lens and released Undercard (Merge, 2010). Both were largely irrelevant.
The trajectory of the Mountain Goats
(still the trio of Darnielle, bassist Peter Hughes and Superchunk's drummer Jon Wurster)
towards overproduced pop music continued
via All Eternals Deck (Merge, 2011). While still a folk album at heart,
the sound was a state-of-the-art multi-layered delicacy, mixing
doo-wop and Donovan-esque folk in High Hawk Season, evoking
Van Morrison's soul shuffles with Damn These Vampires and launching into cowpunk frenzy in Estate Sign Sale.
Darnielle, a former psychiatric nurse, is the most psychological of the singer-songwriters of alt-country, and proves it again on
Transcendental Youth (Merge, 2012), another bleak fresco of a humankind
that struggles to survive:
loners, criminals, homeless people, drug addicts, paranoids and madmen.
The mournful White Cedar is a typical Darnielle elegy, but the emotional
core of the album lies in the more energetic songs:
Cry for Judas, that sounds like an agitated Van Morrison,
the rocking Harlem Roulette (a tribute to singer Frankie Lymon before he died of an overdose),
the demonic country-rocker Night Light scarred by a strident keyboard distortion,
and especially the catchy, pounding, piano-driven power-ballad The Diaz Brothers, halfway between Elton John and Warren Zevon.
Matthew White's horn arrangements, that are the second voice of many songs,
shine especially on the jazzy closer, Transcendental Youth.
Beat the Champ (Merge, 2015) tries a bit too hard to impress.
Matthew White's horn arrangements are more intrusive than decorative in
the over-the-top ragtime of Southwestern Territory, although
they provide a comic counterpoint to Foreign Object.
The country-rocker du jour, The Ballad of Bull Ramos, sounds
forced and amateurish,
the would-be-anthemic upbeat The Legend of Chavo Guerrero just doesn't get to the point of being anthemic,
and the band even unleashes the punk-rock Choked Out to wake up the listener. In vain.
Piano and drums craft the jazzy Fire Editorial, which, technically
speaking, is the most accomplished song.
Goths (2017) added Matt Douglas (keyboards and woodwinds) to the line-up,
and removed the guitar from the band. Ostensibly a tribute to British goth-rock
of the late 1970s, is a completely different album from the previous two.
It opens with the lugubrious, emphatic Rain in Soho, a summary of
rock melodrama with echoes of
Jim Steinman,
Nick Cave and
Stan Ridgway,
and vocal effects that evoke both the Mamas & the Papas and a medieval monk choir.
But then the album gets lost in user-friendly muzak that has little "goth"
in it:
the folk-rock of Andrew Eldritch Is Moving Back to Leeds,
the boogie-pop of Unicorn Tolerance
the neo-soul of Wear Black
and the closing soul-jazz fanfare of Abandoned Flesh.
The swinging Paid in Cocaine at least boasts an evocative atmosphere
a` la Randy Newman.
Darnielle is also the author of novels such as
"Universal Harvester" (2016).
The next album of the Mountain Goats,
In League With Dragons (2019), was a massive step backwards.
Ostensibly a concept devoted to fantasy and crime fiction,
it lacks musical depth and results in a rather monotonous experience,
with the lively Byrds-ian Passaic 1975 to wake you up halfway before you
fall asleep again, and the bombastic prog-rock of Sicilian Crest
linking this concept to the early magniloquent concepts of the 1970s.
Songs for Pierre Chuvin (2020) was a self-tribute to his "boombox" days, the era before Tallahassee, before the glossy arrangements of the
2010s. The songs feel improvised and deliberately unfinished. One is a worthy
addition to his canon: Their Gods Do Not Have Surgeons.
Getting Into Knives (2020) is a varied collection that rangers from
saloon-style soul-rock (Get Famous) to
piano elegies (The Last Place I Saw You Alive), and from
lounge jazz balladry (Tidal Wave) to ebullient country-rock
(standout Corsican Mastiff Stride); but hardly groundbreaking or
notable in any particular way.
Adding keyboardist Alicia Bognanno to the quartet of Darnielle,
multi-instrumentalist Matt Douglas,
bassist Peter Hughes and
drummer Jon Wurster,
the Mountain Goats released
Dark in Here (Merge, 2021), containing the gentle
country-rocking Mobile and
the Stan Ridgway-esque western-sounding melodrama Dark in Here,
but also bland somnolent jazzy songs like When a Powerful Animal Comes and To the Headless Horseman, culminating in the
lifeless The Slow Parts on Death Metal Albums,
i.e. an album of pure atmosphere.
The impeccable production also transfers to
Bleed Out (2022), except that here the band adopts a harder-hitting sound.
The rocking Training Montage and
Wage Wars Get Rich Die Handsome, bordering on
punk-rock, a hybrid of Husker Du and R.E.M.,
sound promising but the rest is "middle of the road" stuff.
Bones Don't Rust sounds like lightweight Doors.
The calmer tunes, like the funk-jazz jam Guys on Every Corner and the country-pop ditty Incandescent Ruins, fair poorly, but the
seven-minute songs, Hostages and Bleed Out (the longest of Darnielle's career), fare even worse.
Jenny from Thebes (2023), a rock opera and a sequel to All Hail West Texas, is a set of
embarrassing choruses and arrangements.
Not even the rocking power-pop of Murder at the 18th St Garage
can redeem this collection of
bland, generic, derivative AOR with the occasional good hook
(Only One Way) and the occasional burst of pathos
(Same as Cash).
