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Mountain Goats' new release lacks consistency

The Mountain Goats’ newest album has its highlights and its downfalls.

By Esten Hurtle
Feb. 19, 2008

John Darnielle, creative mind behind The Mountain Goats, sounds best on cassette tape.

Despite abandoning the medium following 2002’s All Hail West Texas, these boom box recordings make up the high point of the prolific group’s catalogue, which began in 1991 and continues to this day.

There was something sincere about hearing an acoustic guitar distort and twist through a poorly designed microphone onto magnetic tape, but those days have long since passed into indie-folk legend.

The latest addition to The Mountain Goats’ already staggering number of releases, Heretic Pride, does not mark any significant departure from the style Darnielle adopted since choosing studio recordings over his old boom box.

The basic formula from 2006’s Get Lonely and 2005’s The Sunset Tree remains unchanged; acoustic folk is the norm here, accentuated with sparse strings and occasional piano.

Yet, it’s hard to understand exactly where Darnielle will go with all this studio luster.

The record opens with “Sax Rohmer #1,” a powerful track whose chorus narrates a theme often found in Mountain Goats tunes, a pressing desire to return home.

After this opener comes a relative drought of interesting songs.

While “San Bernardino” remains a decent if not slightly repetitive tune and “Heretic Pride,” the album’s title track, outstrips the worst of The Goats’ recent catalogue by far, to describe the rest of the tracks on the first half of the record would only require more justifications.

If a listener has to reason out a song to appreciate it, chances are it’s lacking to begin with.

And this is exactly what these songs are: lacking.

Not great, not bad, but missing something that should be there.

Thankfully, the second half of the record picks up the slack.

The heavily distorted guitar in “Lovecraft In Brooklyn” shows that there is still new territory for The Goats to explore.

This song is positively chilling; it reeks of paranoia and worrisome phobias, switchblades and strangers in the night.

There are few weak points (“Tianchi Lake” and “Sept 15th, 1983” are the only two that come to mind) after “In The Craters On The Moon,” the record’s seventh track.

“Marduk T-Shirt Men’s Room Incident” is exactly what all of the lost-in-the-haze songs on the first half of the record could have been if they were more fully fleshed out.

As the final chorus begs one to “stay weightless, formless, blameless, nameless,” it feels as though Darnielle is finally succeeding in doing the same himself.

There’s not even a tinge of awkward phrasing in this song’s lyrics; he tells his story in a straightforward fashion, with an air of unwilling separation.

It is exactly this kind of style that makes Darnielle such a stand-out lyricist.

If he were able to maintain the varied sounds, catchy melodies and brilliant lyrics of this half of the record throughout its entirety, we would be left with what would come close to a masterpiece.

As it is, Heretic Pride is not necessarily a bad record; it just lacks any kind of focus.

Some songs meander about, while others are remarkably on point.

Maybe the quick recording process of the tape days augmented The Mountain Goats’ ability to produce well-crafted songs, or maybe Darnielle is using up his last few emotionally laden stories. Regardless, there’s nothing like an unremarkable record to make you long for the good old days.