The Mountain Goats –
The Life of the World to Come
(4AD)

Ah, another baleful, frozen-skied, back-to-work autumn setting in, and another grimly introspective Mountain Goats album, right on cue to accompany it. Long may the annual cycle continue thus.

Those paying close attention to the ebb and flow of John Darnielle’s ever-prolific songwriting mojo (waves hello) will have noted some curious developments in his work of recent, with his attempts to expand his palette and keep his inspiration fresh perhaps showing through a little too clearly at times as he ploughs ever onward through the cathartic possibilities of words and chords.

Fans will have noticed the growth in what, for want of a better term, we might call “referential” songwriting – by that I mean songs that take some specific moment or event from history or popular culture, and deal with it in the abstract, creating an impressionistic picture of the emotions and characters involved, without venturing to spell out any specifics. Darnielle then tends to assign the song a title that hints – sometimes rather obscurely- at the original subject matter, and leaves the listener to do the detective work re: piecing together the song’s eventual significance.

Sometimes this technique works brilliantly, and a song like ‘Sept. 15th 1983’ from last year’s “Heretic Pride” was, if anything, even more fascinating and unusual BEFORE I figured out that its lyrics referred to the murder of reggae legend Prince Far I. Similarly, one doesn’t need a background in South East Asian cryptozoology to appreciate the feeling behind ‘Tianchi Lake’, or to google ‘Roger Patterson Van Crash’ to enjoy the song of the same name.

But on other occasions the device can prove extremely frustrating, serving to alienate more casual listeners. ‘Michael Myers Resplendent’ for instance may be one of the most effective moments on “Heretic Pride” when taken in context, but its significance could easily be lost upon anyone who failed to clock the title at a live show or missed the reference to the cinematic serial killer. This problem became especially galling on last year’s self-released ‘Satanic Messiah’ EP. If you happen to be familiar with the music and influence of cult Brazilian proto-Black Metal band Sarcofago, then sure, ‘Sarcofago Live’ is quite enjoyable. If not, what do you get? Just some verses about some people, somewhere, “raging” in a basement. Even more obtuse is ‘Wizard Buys a Hat’, which still leaves me puzzled. Sure, I like looking at the title, and picturing a wizard buying a hat, but beyond that...? A middling tune and some words about some guy wondering around town, seemingly hiding from some pursuers? Whatever. These songs are ok, but they fail to hit home the way that first rate Mountain Goats material should. When you’re listening to a song with an obscure backstory to it, the power of the song should sell an interest in the context to you, not vice versa, y’know what I mean?

But, for better of worse, this seems to be the way the wagon is heading, and if the stew of literary and cultural reference points successfully weaved into “Heretic Pride” marked The Mountain Goats out as a band whose albums can come complete with an implied reading list, then “The Life of the World to Come” takes things one step further, effectively presenting us with a *compulsory* reading list – albeit one limited to a single volume. Framed in its press release as “twelve hard lessons learned from the bible”, each song on the album takes its name from the bible verse that inspired it. That Darnielle should be a fan of the good book is scarcely surprising, given the fire & brimstone and narratives of sin and redemption that underlay much Mountain Goats material, and that he should prove to be predominantly an Old Testament man is equally unsurprising.

After the macabre blowout of “Heretic Pride”, “The Life of the World To Come” is a more somber, low-key affair, much in the vein of 2006’s “Get Lonely”. It is, some critic with a deathly pallor and dust for brains is laying in wait somewhere to pronounce, the most “ ‘ mature ‘ “ Mountain Goats album to date. So ‘mature’ in fact that much of it veers closer to the perspective of a elderly patriarch contemplating the inevitable from his deathbed than to the desperate, self-immolating young people that Darnielle has often spoken through in song. Within its grooves, a series of anonymous narrators calmly confront such issues as faith, loss, loneliness, earthly devotion and the persistence of hope, leading, inevitably, to the direct consideration of grief and death. It is, to put it bluntly, pretty grim stuff.

Like his fellow bible-basher Nick Cave, I gather that Darnielle now rents an office space that he uses solely to work on his song-writing on a nine-to-five basis, a decision that we might be able to see reflected not only in the two men’s shared interest in the good book, but also in their fondness for funereal tailoring, slow, sustain-heavy minor key piano chords and, most worryingly, a certain emotional detachment that has started to creep into Darnielle’s work, and that has arguably consigned Cave to dreary self-parody for years.

What was always most thrilling about The Mountain Goats material in the past was its immediacy, and its unflinching honesty. Even when working through wholly fictional narratives, Darnielle’s driving need to throw every ounce of his often frightening excesses of emotion and empathy into his music was beyond question, and mistakes, repetitions and self-indulgence could all be overlooked simply because his songs sounded like bulletins from a life being led in a state of permanent flux, all laid down on tape in private in a spare few minutes before the next crisis, the next revelation, the next bus out of town, all suffused with the shadows of experiences too overwhelming to easily deal with. Whether or not they actually were conceived under such circumstances is besides the point – they sound as if they were. Listen to ‘Sweden’ or ‘Full Force Galesburg’ or ‘The Coroner’s Gambit’, and that’s what you’ll hear: truth and desperation; one man against the world; all that stuff.

It’s a state of mind that every wouldbe alt-cowboy singer/songwriter ever has taken a shot at and almost without exception failed to realise, simply because, unlike Darnielle, they’re not there already, and if you find yourself trying to get to some dark, mixed up place just so you can write songs about it – I mean, what the hell dude? Put the stetson away and get a fucking job. The Mountain Goats have never made a virtue of suffering – they’ve just thrown it at the world and hoped for the best.

But, having exploded their approach into widescreen perfection on their initial string of classic 4AD albums, more recent ‘Goats material is starting to show a similar tiredness of spirit to all the Van Zandt wannabes they render irrelevant, and to Cave for that matter – the feeling of ‘songwriting as an exercise’ that presumably comes from sitting at the piano all day staring at the wall for inspiration, and the “reference” songs are only the most obvious symptom of this change of pace.

Nonetheless though, we can put such fears aside for the moment, as ‘The Life of the World to Come’ comes out on top once again. Spending some time in the new record’s company serves to affirm the essential strength of Darnielle’s A-grade material, a strength that lies beyond any change of circumstances or change of pace in the songwriting/recording department. Whilst they may no longer be crashing through your motel room door with flying fists, the songs herein are thematically consistent and assured meditations that aim at universal relevance in a way this band has rarely attempted before. They may be almost entirely removed from the baggage of monsters, teenage runaways, self-destructive addicts and doomed lovers who populate the ‘Goats back catalogue, but, after living with the album for a few weeks, we come to realize how little we still need these familiar faces, and we can be reassured, and moved, perhaps more gently but more firmly than we’re used to, by the way in which these songs attain a solemn, self-contained beauty that is all their own.

Before the new calm takes hold though, we’re still rewarded with one last sociopathic bellow-fest, in the form of the second track here, ‘Psalms 40:2’ (the King James says: “He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings”). With the full band launching into a rolling, melodramatic vamp reminiscent of ‘Sax Rohmer #1’, and John spitting out his words like a crooked preacher, this is the most authentic fire & brimstone moment on the album by quite some distance, and the one that connects most strongly with Mountain Goats past. Through clenched teeth and fists, the song seems to tell the story of some people undertaking a traumatic crime spree/road trip through the bible-belt, investing their actions with a religious grandeur as if daring the Lord to strike down the monsters He has created. “Left that place in ruin”, they growl of a desecrated chapel, “drunk on the spirits, high on fumes”. Startling and unnerving stuff.

Another gift for those of us looking for the cheap thrills of yore is track 5, ‘Hebrews 11:40’, (“God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect”). A brooding little number that comes straight from the playbook of ‘Get Lonely’, it becomes remarkably compelling after a few listens, with Owen Pallet’s deliciously creepy string arrangements (more subtle than Erik Friedlander’s strings on the last album) coming to the fore. Beginning with a wealth of graveyard/horror movie imagery, this song seems to concern a man who is entirely alone in the world, rising from the tomb, either literally or figuratively, and assessing the challenges ahead of him, calm in the certainty that some implacable faith will see him through to his goal… whatever that might be. He talks of having to invent an imaginary family to keep him going, “if it comes to that”, and of his willingness to hurt whoever stands in his way. Although there’s no obvious wider context here, you don’t feel inclined to doubt him as he sings, “If not by faith then by the sword / I’m going to be restored”.

Never before has the idea of The Mountain Goats releasing records on 4AD (“eerie madrigals on the campus eggslicer” and all that) seemed quite so appropriate, as songs like these emerge as beautiful bits of gothic, sounding like miniature Castles of Ontario, the perfect soundtrack to some black-clad early ‘90s Vertigo comics epic.

On any other Mountain Goats album, these outbursts would mark the calm before the storm, but here they’re more like the storm before the calm. The album’s true heart lays somewhere else entirely, in the sparse, ringing piano chords that underscore John’s voice on ‘Genesis 30:3’ (“And she said, Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees that I may also have children by her” ), one of the simplest and most beautiful devotional songs Darnielle has ever written. When I say ‘devotional’, I’m not sure whether the song expresses devotion to a lover or to a God, but to be honest it scarcely matters. As with several of the best songs on the record, Darnielle intentionally blurs the distinction between earthy and metaphysical faith, and in the process succeeds wonderfully in rising above the knuckleheaded bickering and terminal point-missing that blights 99% of contemporary discourse on religion, instead cutting straight to essential core of belief. In these songs, he speaks of the reality of feeling something within you that stretches beyond yourself, of the overriding sense of faith in the beauty of the world, and of a sense of purpose and an unwavering certainty that can be clung to throughout the very worst of times, whether it manifests itself as devotion to a church, as a gnostic ‘spark of the divine’, or simply as time spent in the arms of your beloved, or with an equally beloved family – for what, after all, is the difference?

Obviously the rather curious choice of bible verse complicates matters, but that aside ‘Genesis 30:3’ reminds me more than anything of the scene in Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenin’ wherein Levin, the tormented agnostic, realizes for the first time his sense of underlying, unshakable faith when presented with his newborn daughter. As usual, John D. gets it in one; “for several hours we lay there, last ones of our kind / harder days coming maybe, I don't mind / it sounds kind of dumb when i say it but it's true / I would do anything for you”.

This idea of the love song expanded to cover universal faith as well as personal devotion is returned to again and again on the album, as the prisoner serving life and tormented by monstrous imaginings in ‘1 John 4:16’ (“And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him”) testifies as if in prayer, “And I won’t be afraid of anything ever again / because I know you’re thinking of me, as it’s just about to rain”.

Not every song on “The Life of the World..” works for me, I’ll admit; I’m just discussing my favourite ones above. Some of the others leave me cold, some a merely a bit odd, and one in particular I just don’t wanna hear right now – it doesn’t seem like the right time. Sitting at the centre of the record, the cornerstone that puts the rest into context perhaps, is ‘Matthew 25:21’ (”His lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord”), a straight-forward narrative about traveling to visit a loved one dying of cancer for the final time. At six minutes, it is probably one of the longest Mountain Goats songs to date. It opens with “They had you hooked up, to a fentanyl drip / to help mitigate the pain a little bit”, and gets progressively more hard going from thereon in. No gospel-aided philosophisin’ here, no declarations of self-belief, just a plain account of death, and a grief that it sometimes seems like the rest of the album exists to try to cushion. Musically, it’s flat, awkward and repetitious, just like the situation described probably would be, and I confess, as a carefree young-ish sorta person, it’s a freaking downer – one I’ll skip through if it’s all the same to you.

But at the same time, I know that if or when I find myself in similar circumstances, it’s the first song I’ll search out on my mp3 player, to see if it helps or reassures, to find solace, to compare notes or just to fill the journey to the hospital with something that won’t drive me to distraction. And that’s what this song, and the others on the album, are essentially all about, the same thing the archetypal good-hearted priest is all about – trying to help. This particular song might not be meant for me, right now, but if it manages to hit even a few people at the right time, if they hold onto it to some small extent in a hard place, Darnielle will have succeeded, and can be proud of his achievement, like a steadfast pastor of no fixed denomination.

You may think this is all getting kinda mealy-mouthed and sanctimonious – hell, you may have reached that decision as soon as you heard about the bible verse song title gimmick. But Darnielle’s success here comes in the way he approaches his subject matter not as a dogmatic Xtian, but as the kind of flawed, spiritually bereft post-industrial human that modernist novels always used to warn us about, picking up the lessons of the scriptures for the first time and finding them more relevant to his own being than he ever suspected. As the chaotic, self-doubting protagonist of ‘Romans 10:9’ confirms for us in a rousing chorus adapted straight from the text:

“If you can believe in your heart
And confess with your lips
Surely you will be
Saved one day”

And if we can put aside our kneejerk secular distaste for such phraseology and take that at face value, is it not a pretty fucking righteous note on which to start the day?

Mp3s:

Psalms 40:2
Genesis 30:3

Buy "The Life of the World to Come":

Norman
4AD

Labels: album reviews, The Mountain Goats