The Mountain Goats – Heretic Pride (4AD)

“I think writing songs is kind of a monstrous activity, really – that when the Frankenstein monster yells at the flames and waves his hands to get them away, he’s actually singing a song about the fire. That is how I think of the whole process of writing, kinda.”

- John Darnielle, interview with Dark But Shining, 2006

“The crowd grows denser by the second,
As we near the centre of the town
They dig a trench right in the main square,
And they pick me up and throw me down

And I start laughing like child,
I mark their faces one by one
Transfiguration’s going to come for me at last,
And I will burn hotter than the sun”

- The Mountain Goats, ‘Heretic Pride’, 2008

I.

Heavy footsteps ring out and trenchcoats swirl as an agent crests the shadows of a fog-shrouded harbour. Grey ships toss upon black waves, and sinister, silent exchanges of captives and information take place as weary sailors stagger back to their cabins in time to sail at dawn. Our narrator is an Indiana Jones style hero, desperately running homeward, his own blood in his mouth, pushing images of entropy, surrender and decay from his mind as whatever esoteric mission he was undertaking reaches its grand conclusion. A stirring theme blasts forth via widescreen, cinematic strings, sounding just as out of synch with the world of indie-rock circa 2007 as our anachronistic hero’s time-honoured plight, and, with the incredible “Sax Rohmer #1”, The Mountain Goats’ most ambitious album to date kicks into action.

Over the part decade or so, John Darnielle and his fellow Mountain Goats (on the occasions when there have been any) have learned to express themselves primarily through that most unwieldy of media, the Concept Album. Or, if that term doesn’t sit comfortably with you, let us instead just say; through carefully assembled series of thematically linked songs, often featuring reoccurring characters and situations and a discernable narrative arc. That is the formula which has seen the band amass what I never tire of telling people is the greatest body of original songwriting thus far produced in the 21st century. Even when the thread of narrative wavers to the point of non-existence, as on pre-4AD collections such as “Sweden” and “The Coroner’s Gambit”, the pattern is established, and it is the fate of all Mountain Goats records past or present to have their fragmented conflicts and events, their carefully preserved moments of ecstasy and anguish, sewn together Frankenstein style by dedicated fans; those of us who need a dose of Darnielle’s song-writing to get us through the day as surely as the guys in a Peckinpah movie simply HAVE to get that gunfight out of the way before bedtime. We have an almost limitless capacity for creating our own, internal potboilers as we find ourselves wondering of an afternoon whether the people in Going To Queens are the same people who were in, say, The Recognition Scene, and if so, *what that might mean*, as they zoom toward death or glory in our ears.

And so, on first exposure, Heretic Pride proves the trickiest listen for the Narrative-Hunters since 2004’s ‘We Shall All Be Healed’ with its auto-biographical patchwork of drug culture, espionage, itinerant teenage gangs and cryptic references to Belgium. Lacking any sense of direct narrative continuity (although I’m sure some die-hards will find it there regardless), ‘Heretic Pride’ instead takes the form of a series of startlingly intense vignettes, more emotionally, geographically and chronologically diverse than was permitted by the tighter structures of previous albums. But nonetheless, a strong central theme is definitely still present, and, following a brief glance at the album’s tracklisting, it soon becomes clear that the concept behind Heretic Pride is that of horror, fear of the unknown, and, more specifically, of monsters.

Horror imagery has always been present to some extent in the ‘Goats work, creeping around the edges of the songs and reflecting the unholy desperation of their protagonists, from the cloven hoof-prints turning up in the garden in The First Few Desperate Hours through to the ghosts preparing to take on substance in The Young Thousands. Darnielle has always taken pride in constructing his lyrics so as to concentrate as much visceral power as possible into the smallest musical space, crafting couplets that can hit the unsuspecting listener like hammers, disarming critical faculties and short attention spans until he’s got his message across, and judicious flashes of macabre, supernatural imagery have naturally played a part in this. But on ‘Heretic Pride’ the floodgates are opened, and, as if in reaction to the relatively subdued singer-songwriter moves of 2006’s ‘Get Lonely’, we here find Darnielle at his most strident and unhinged, taking stock of some of his established obsessions – doomed love stories, despair and alienation, triumph in the face of overwhelming adversity, and singular, cathartic moments of all descriptions – and recasting them as part of a world swarming with fire and madness, misshapen creatures, secret cults and darkened alleyways, flaming torch wielding villagers, beasts from beyond the stars, horror movie icons and Edwardian pulp fiction… whilst still keeping a tangible connection to the one thing that’s REALLY frightening – cold, strange, sad, wonderful reality - visible at all times.

So check your revolvers gentlemen, and pack some extra paraffin for the lamps.

We’re going to go in track by track.

II.

‘Sax Rohmer #1’ we’ve already covered, but what an opener it is! Good grief; that’s all I have to say on the matter. Launching us straight into a pulse-racing chase for survival set to a soaring, heroic main theme, the album has a definite cinematic feel to it from the start, and the message is clear: ‘Heretic Pride’ is going to be BIG BUDGET. The production is crisp, bright and loud, with Darnielle’s trademark propulsive acoustic strumming frequently buried or pushed aside entirely by thunderous rock drums, free-wheeling electric organ, shrieking, subliminal studio FX of uncertain origin, and, most prominently, Erik Friedlander’s versatile and dramatic string arrangements, all exploding out of the mix like the juddering booms and blasts of a THX-tweaked modern cinema ‘experience’. For make no mistake, despite it’s eccentric catalogue of lyrical esoterica, ‘Heretic Pride’ very much has the feel of a horror/suspense flick of a ‘90s/’00s vintage. It’s all drained colours, extreme close-ups of pale skin, visceral audio/visual ‘shocks’, grim autumnal backstreets and shining steel interiors; knives that look oh-so-very-sharp. Personally, I would have preferred an evocation of a more fuzzy, over-saturated, mind-warping ‘60s/’70s gothic kinda texture, but such is life. As a musical expression of the former aesthetic, it’s pretty exquisitely done.

(Sax Rohmer, incidentally, was a popular pulp fiction writer of the Edwardian era, best remembered as the creator of Fu Manchu.)

For long-time Goats listeners, the lack of a central guitar strum at the heart of each song is disconcerting, but then, maybe this is what John was hearing in his head as he hammered down songs to his cassette boombox back in the day? Maybe not, but whatever, the one thing ‘Heretic Pride’ certainly isn’t lacking is Drama. Between episodes of blood-boiling melodrama, even the album’s carefully delineated moments of calm seem deliberate and hyper-real in their calmness. Track # 2 is ‘San Bernardino’, and we’ve gotta ask, would it have killed him to add “Going To..” to the title? Just for old time’s sake? The song’s lovers hit the open road in search of a new home, much as they have done ever since Darnielle began committing his songs to tape, whether on the back of Jenny’s bike, or across the sea to Scotland. In San Bernardino though, they’ve finally found what they were looking for. They’ve got their house and their kid, and for once it’s happiness hangs heavy in the air. This being ‘Heretic Pride’ though, they reach their new Eden by “consulting maps from earlier days / dead languages on our tongues”, and are accompanied by a backing track constructed entirely from overdubbed cellos. Were you in a big narrative mood, you could almost read this song as Darnielle bidding a quick, sunny farewell to the couples whose desperate travails he’s been painstakingly documenting all these years, before turning his attention to new concerns: the concerns of The Monster.

One of the chief themes Darnielle riffs on throughout this album is the idea of the monster as the outcast from society, the unfairly persecuted, the man or creature who is trapped within a society, but completely alien from it, and how such eternally lonely creatures must react to their circumstances. Such musings come to a head on ‘Heretic Pride’s title track, a raucous forced march of a song, telling the tale of a religious heretic being dragged from his home by an angry mob and burned alive in the town square, as he finds triumph in his destruction, laughing in the faces of his accusers. John Darnielle and Peter Hughes performed this song when I saw them play at the Union Chapel before Christmas, with the pulpit, crucifix and assorted other Nazarene paraphernalia towering behind them, and boy, it was mighty. As is often the way when you hear a new song for the first time in a live context, it was over before we’d really been able to fully process what was happening lyrically, but the sentiment still came through loud and clear and near heart-stopping; a war cry for the doomed outsider.

Next up is ‘Autoclave’, and… and…. my gods, it’s just amazing. It’s a broken heart song, a self-hate song, yet another loneliness song, done straight up, with all the awkward baggage these concepts bring with them, and yet somehow, by the weird grace of mixed up sound and word, by the spirit of Husker Du, it flies high like the fucking wind. John Auster’s drumming really takes centre stage here; simple and heavy and unstoppable, the way a brilliant drum-beat should be, and it’s like; Mountain Goat! Drums! Together at last! Let’s never go back! And then there’s a fast strummed electric guitar somewhere off in the distance, and some weird machine feedback noise that grows over the course of the song, and there’s a little melodic kinda pizzicato violin thing, and there’s some sustained organ chords and whatever, and somehow it all comes together into a fearsome Frankenstein’s monster of a perfect, devastating song. Purely human desolation, but framed in terms the creature from the James Whale movies would understand, and somehow energized with a charge of life that let’s you know that the protagonist is gonna keep on going regardless, just like the monster, without even asking why. Through the woods, through the fire, through the icy wastes, wherever: just like you at 8am on a winter morning, braindead, going wherever you’re going. “Give me your hand,” he sings, “Let me look in your eyes, as my last chance to feel human, begins to vaporise..”.

Damn. You’d think knowing that your song of the year has arrived in January would be a disappointing experience, but it feels good.

(According to Wikipedia, an autoclave is “..a pressurized device designed to heat aqueous solutions above their boiling point to achieve sterilization. It was invented by Charles Chamberland in 1879. The term autoclave is also used to describe an industrial machine in which elevated temperature and pressure are used in processing materials.”)

III.

‘New Zion’ is a minor piece, taking us to the inner sanctum of a religious cult of some kind, where “High Priest of Salem” rants in his robes, whilst our hero meanwhile lies contented in a glade by the river, dreaming of “old things made new”. If you were determined to look for clues, you could see it as a precursor of sorts to ‘Heretic Pride’, but that seems a little crass. It’s a nice song, and a pleasantly ambiguous one, so let’s leave it at that.

‘So Desperate’ is a private psychodrama, played out within a steamed up car in an Episcopalian churchyard. It’s classic Mountain Goats on the verse, with a beautiful, stately melody rising up for the chorus. It’s about a couple again. I think maybe they’re saying goodbye for the last time. I know - yet again, but it’s always got to hurt. I don’t know if this one matches up to the crushing finality of Snow Crush Killing Song, but then what could? Placed somewhere special on the colour-chart of love song emotion, this is like the song that the lovers in ‘The Dark End Of The Street’ might sing, after the world catches up with them. Needless to say, it’s a sad one.

‘In The Craters Of The Moon’ seems to follow straight on from there, plunging us straight back into the depths of ‘Get Lonely’ territory, and beyond, into a realm of stifling gothic paranoia that suffuses the rest of the album by degrees. We’re back on our own from here on in. The drums and strings are suddenly too damn much; shrieking, dissonant atmospherics straight out of Bernard Hermann, as the vocal catches John in full ‘I’m-gonna-have-a-nervous-breakdown-any-fucking-second’ form. The set up for this one is a crumbling New York brownstone ; no daylight ever. Some boggle-eyed, desperate guy in a greasy trenchcoat, driven to distraction by stress and loneliness, and the knowledge that something’s coming to GET HIM. Mysterious initials chalk themselves onto apartment doors; the phone rings, but he’s too scared to answer; blood in the water, worse things than he can imagine in the shadows… pure horror.

Coming from the same night-haunted place, ‘Lovecraft In Brooklyn’ tightens the screws further, and… you knew I was going to go to town on this one, right?

*ahem*

In 1924, the notoriously reclusive H.P. Lovecraft married the writer / clothier Sonia Greene, and moved with her to New York. This seems to have been the most stressful period of Lovecraft’s not-terribly-rosy life, both personally and professionally. The marriage was an immediate failure and he found himself unable to gain work as a writer, whilst the experience of living in a densely populated, multi-racial urban area seemed to his oversensitive psyche to be about as distressing an environment as could be imagined. Lovecraft’s time in New York inspired two stories set in the city, firstly the uncharacteristically subtle science fiction story ‘Cool Air’, and secondly, ‘The Horror At Red Hook’, one of his most startling and overlooked tales. A riot of near-hallucinatory purple prose, ‘..Red Hook’ in places reads more like the ravings of a particularly imaginative lunatic than the work of a professional writer. Shot through with the most overt racism to be found anywhere in his work, expressed with a frenzy bordering on outright misanthropy, Lovecraft builds a picture of Brooklyn as a continuous nightmare of cheap, collapsing tenements, overflowing with bestial, sub-human immigrants, chattering in barbarous tongues and offering grotesque sacrifices to their dark gods. The toxic atmosphere of the story is overpowering as the narrator suffers from blurred vision, headaches and is physically repulsed by just about everything and everyone he encounters. A reflection of Lovecraft’s take on his marriage can also perhaps be glimpsed in the story’s climax, which sees a morally/racially corrupted honeymooning couple being subjected to a series of visions straight out of a medieval grimoire before being torn apart by a vengeful female demon identified only as ‘Lilith’. (This was before Lovecraft began to develop his own Cthulhu Mythos to replace such hackneyed reference points.) It’s… quite a piece of writing, and a perfect example of that rare thing: a horror story which is truly horrible, the fact that its sentiments are apparently *heartfelt* making it all the more so.

It is clearly an invocation of all this (well.. the misanthropy and urban claustrophobia anyway, hopefully not the racism) that John Darnielle had in mind when he wrote ‘Lovecraft In Brooklyn’. Surely the most conventionally ROCKING Mountain Goats song recorded to date, it sees our tormented Lovecraftian protagonist reaching breaking point to the accompaniment of churning, processed cheese Greg Ginn guitar riffs and violent, rock hero bass n’ drummage. He rushes through crowded NY streets on a hotter than hell day, then sees them transfigured into a grasping, inescapable cosmic threat as night falls, and the dark secrets he holds get the better of him; “Someday something’s coming / from way out beyond the stars / It’ll kill us while we stand here / It’ll store our brains in mason jars / And the girl behind the counter / asks me how I feel today….”

The song is a hysterical piece of sturm-und-drang musical aggression that mirrors the atmosphere of ‘The Horror at Red Hook’ perfectly, and those of you still pushing the album-narrative angle will take note of the fact that this is the point at which our monster/outsider starts to cease to be a sympathetic character. Like Lovecraft’s hero sitting on the subway, watching two Jews talking and wishing he had an opportunity to strangle them, our man is becoming a threat; twisted by circumstances beyond his control, staggering through the streets with his hallucinations and his switchblade.

IV.

Merciful relief arrives in the form of ‘Tianchi Lake’, an otherworldly moment of calm amid the chaos. To a gentle, lilting tune, we witness here the monster in his natural habitat, content and unself-conscious in the clear mountain waters; “no one taking pictures, everyone is still”.

(Tianchi Lake is a crater lake on the border between China and North Korea. According to Wikipedia, “On September 6, 2007, Zhuo Yongsheng (director of a TV station's news center run by the administration office of the nature reserve at Mount Changbaishan, Jilin), shot a 20-minute video of 6 seal-like, finned "Lake Tianchi Monsters", near the border with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. He sent pictures of the Loch Ness-type creatures to Xinhua's Jilin provincial bureau. One of them showed the creatures swimming in 3 pairs, in parallel. Another showed them together, leaving ripples on the volcanic lake.” Well I’ll be damned. )

The song’s hyper-real depiction of an imagined oriental paradise recalls the weird, romantic longing of 19th century colonial paintings of ‘island life’, and it proves one of the album’s most strangely affecting moments, with the closing image of children outside the schoolhouse “painting pictures all day long, of stranger things than these” sure to bring a quiet tear to the eye of every believer in the beauty of the human imagination.

Now, it is my fervent belief that a song with a title which begins “How To..” should make an effort to offer some practical advice on the subject at hand, and thus if I were to write “How To Embrace A Swamp Creature”, I’d be sure to mention, say, the necessity of wearing wellington boots, and ways of clearing enough pond weed out of the way to allow mutual eye contact, and things like that. It probably tells you something of my state of mind that this actually sounds like quite a good idea for a song, but thankfully The Mountain Goats got there first, and their embrace is different proposition entirely. Returning to the city, and the unbearable headspace of “Craters of the Moon” and “Lovecraft..”, our creature has “made it through town somehow”, and follows the light up to his girlfriend’s apartment. It’s easy to read the song as another portrait of urban alienation, of a man/monster entirely unable to tolerate or understand his familiar surroundings, unable to breath the air, as the bathroom fills with smoke, the kitchen becomes the place where “the flashing swords gleam”. There’s no death in this song, no madness or fire or great unsettling events, just a situation where the answer to the question ‘what’s wrong?’ is ‘everything in the entire world’.

We’re reaching the final section of the album now, and things have been on the boil long enough. Clearly it’s time for Heretic Pride to end in the only way a modern horror story can; with a whole bunch of murders. Hopefully you’re not anticipating any regular, run of the mill slayings by this point though, and quite so – this movie has class.

And so - ‘Marduk T-Shirt Men’s Room Incident’. No one else could have written a song like this, turned such an obtuse, eye-grabbing title into a song that is so simple, so haunting, and yet so impossible to pin down. It’s like the kind of dreamlike, temporally/geographically displaced, and utterly devastating scene you might find in the middle of a serious horror movie made by a true master. Like an unexpectedly tender, visceral moment from Lynch or Roeg or Zulawski, it poses questions but permits no breathing space for answers; it simply is what it is. Our man enters the bathroom. Or was he there already? Either way, he’s watching her. I don’t know whether she’s dead or dying, or sick or monstrous, but clearly something’s horribly wrong. Did he do it, did she do it to herself? – it really doesn’t matter. Within the transfixed, traumatised confines of the song, the answer doesn’t even exist. What matters is “hair plastered to her cheeks / Marduk t-shirt, sticking to her skin”. And the female vocals rise up on the chorus like an out of body experience just before you black out.

(Marduk are of course an iconic and long-lived Swedish black metal band, named after the frankly terrifying Mesopotamian god of war. Somehow I can’t help but feel that if you don’t know that already, a certain nuance of the song is lost. I don’t know why.)

(And somewhere in the distance, the continuity editor ruins everything, shouting, of course he did it! This is the same guy from the previous songs, he’s really gone off the deep end!)

‘Sept 15th 1983’, with an uptempo, faintly reggaefied groove, is another kill-scene, although again, a somewhat unexpected one. One of Heretic Pride’s strangest and most intriguing songs, it’ll have you furiously trying to google up some information on the fate that befell one Michael James Williams on the night in question. And, in my case at least, failing to find any. According to The Mountain Goats, Mr. Williams’ dinner with friends was interrupted by ‘Servants of the Pharaoh’, “all business / bearing knives and zip guns”. “If I forget Israel, let me forget my right hand”, he repeats to himself as the paramedics try to revive him. You know, if anyone out there knows what this song is about, please *don’t* tell me… it makes for a glorious mystery.

And so to the final curtain call – ‘Michael Myers Resplendent’. (I hope I won’t be patronizing you all by reminding the less pop-culturally inclined amongst you that Michael Myers is the masked killer in the ‘Halloween’ movies.) Musically, Friedlander owns this song, and it’s an impressive achievement, his strings gaining orchestral weight via the application of reverb and overdubbing, for a judiciously planned dramatic exit. John Darnielle has said in some interview, somewhere, that one of the uniting factors behind all of his song-writing is the notion of doomed characters managing to draw some moment of triumph from their hopeless circumstances, and that’s certainly a principle worth keeping in mind here, as the Monster Narrative reaches its conclusion.

Battered from all sides by hardship, confusion, anger and madness over the course of the proceeding forty minutes, our outsider has finally given in, found a place where the misshapen and unloved can feel at home. “Too long have I let self-respect stand in my way”, he muses as he sits in his make-up chair, ready for his screen call. And this definitely isn’t John Carpenter’s Halloween either, with whatever vague notions of originality and directorial integrity that may or may not convey, this has gotta be, like, the third sequel to the Rob Zombie remake or something. And it’s gonna have a poster that’s black or dark red with a corny looking sunset in the background, and a grainy, mudcaked Myers mask in the foreground and some two word, ‘..’ and’!’ filled quotes from tabloid newspapers, and it’ll still be plastered onto the sides of buses six weeks after the movie rapidly disappears from cinemas, momentarily scaring nervous seven year olds, who, ignorant of the true nature of horror movies, ponder darkly why adults would want to go and see such a barbarous and upsetting looking film (although my god, it’ll be small beans in the fright stakes compared to the mind-bending stuff they used to put on video boxes when I was a kid).

And over in the drive-ins of the Mid-West, if there still are any, or in pot-smoke filled parental basements and whitewashed teen hang-outs if there aren’t, the kids will cheer as our hero – once a transfigured martyr, a tormented scribe, a lonely, gentle, ugly creature, now hidden behind a red ‘Horror: $2’ sticker in a corner of Blockbuster Video – raises his ever-so-shiny knife to bring down the prom queen: “when the scum begins to circle the drains / everybody loves a winner..”.

Roll credits.

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Mp3s >

Sax Rohmer # 1

Marduk T-Shirt Men’s Room Incident

Now be a good chap and buy a copy of ‘Heretic Pride’ from 4AD.

Labels: album reviews, horror, The Mountain Goats