In regards to his song topics, The Mountain Goats’ frontman and songwriter, John Darnielle, has always felt like a magician, who can conjure emotionally resonating lyrics from seemingly depth-less topics. He accomplished this on his last album, Beat The Champ, where every song was about professional wrestling. But however trivial the inspiration is, the outcome certainly is not. At it’s best, The Mountain Goats uses uses a microscope, focusing on the trivial parts of life to find grander truths. John Darnielle focuses small, but finds profound truths about the human experience through this highly specific lens. Darnielle continues his recent tradition on Goths, were he reflects on his teen years as a goth kid and the goth music scene around him.
Specifically, Darnielle uses his personal stories and goth scene references as an exploration of self identity and maturity. Throughout the album, John tells of personal experiences where he shows signs of doubting if he fits into the specific subculture that he had chosen for himself. On the song, “The Grey King and the Silver Flame Attunement” the titular Grey King performs the homebrewed cosmetic dentistry of filing his teeth down to fine spikes and Darnielle decides “I’m pretty hardcore, but I’m not that hardcore.” Darnielle questions his goth identity once again on the song “Unicorn Tolerance” in which he describes several of the “hardcore” activities of his youth, including rubbing bones across his face, hanging out in graveyards, and expressing his appreciation of ghosts. Despite all of his actions, on the chorus he still admits that he has “high unicorn tolerance”. Doesn’t sound too hardcore to me.
Eventually, Darnielle matured out of his goth phase and began to eulogize that moment in history with songs like “Abandoned Flesh” and “Shelved”. On these tracks and many others from the last half of the album, The Mountain Goats mourn the end of an era, with lyrics like “You and me and all of us are gonna have to find a job” and “the rides over, but I’m not ready to go”. Darnielle’s love of the era is abundantly clear because of his ungodly amount of references to goth bands that are beyond me. The finale, “Abandoned Flesh” hypothesizes what his favorite bands are up to nowadays, and he concludes that the world forgot about the band “Gene Loves Jezebel”.
As varied and intriguing as the lyricism is, I can’t say the same for the instrumentation. Goths was proudly flaunted as the first Mountain Goats album without any guitars, but the guitars were barely replace by anything. There is bass and drums almost always plucking away in the background like many other Mountain Goats records, but there is nothing on the forefront to grab the listener’s attention. This is especially true because Darnielle chooses to sing in a gentle, measured, and fragile voice. There are sporadically spurts of beautiful warm horns that grab my attention in the way I’m looking for, but they were used so sparingly that I desperately wanted more. The passivity of the music is amplified by the fact that several songs last upwards of 5 minutes with little variation throughout the song. The length and lack of dynamic songwriting often spoil songs that I start off grooving to. There are no specific songs for me to point fingers to, but when listening to Goths, I constantly felt that the musical ideas had overstayed their welcome. The best song on the album, “Rain in Soho” is the only song with any significant musical progression, with it’s beautiful build-up to an apocalyptic finish brought to life by Darnielle’s classic warbling vocals and an accompanying choir.
I still stand by my statement that John Darnielle has never written a bad song. The problem with Goths is that it would be a much more enjoyable listen at 45 minutes rather than 55. Much like the present day singers of many 80’s goth bands, the album is a little bloated.
Best Songs: “Rain in Soho”, “Stench of the Unburied”, “Andrew Eldritch is Moving Back to Leeds”, and “We Do it Different on the West Coast”.
Written By Taylor Kalsey Two Days After Seeing Them Live at The Mayan Theater in Los Angeles
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