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Goats’ newest album not half ‘bah’d

The Mountain Goats — fronted by singer-songwriter John Darnielle — originally recorded their primitive, lo-fi albums on a boom box with a few microphones hooked up. Even when they brought their production up to speed with current studio technology in 2004’s We Shall All Be Healed, their sparse musical aesthetic remained. Heretic Pride, produced again by John Vanderslice, offers a bigger shake-up, with orchestral strings bringing fuller, more rounded out instrumentation to match Darnielle’s lyrical vision. At the same time, if the album sees an expansion of The Mountain Goats’ sound, it also features a welcome return to Darnielle’s gifts at spinning narrative about other people after his last three heavily autobiographical albums.

Darnielle’s nasal voice has always resembled a more intense, barking version

of Colin Meloy from the Decemberists. On 2006’s Get Lonely, however, Darnielle’s voice became more subdued, losing a lot of his songs’ intrinsic power in the process. On Heretic Pride, he’s managed to reconcile these disparate elements with “San Bernandino” featuring plucked guitar strings and warm cellos as Darnielle’s voice keeps the listener’s attention.

The Mountain Goats greatest strength, though, is in consistently delivering lyrics both off-kilter and affecting — and this is on full display in the album’s best song, “Autoclave.” An autoclave is used to sterilize laboratory equipment and medical supplies, and in this anti-love song, Darnielle uses the autoclave to explain the emotional state of his character: “I am this great unstable mass of blood and foam/ And no emotion that’s worth having would make my heart its home/ My heart’s an autoclave.” Bouncing along with Young Marble Giants–esque muted guitar strings and Annie Clark (aka St. Vincent) providing an angelic harmony to Darnielle’s improbably tuneful chorus, the song is destined for future covers and a permanent spot in The Mountain Goats’ repertoire.

Almost as good is “Lovecraft in Brooklyn,” a song with sharp drums and stabbing guitar lines that offer more muscle for the track than any previous Mountain Goats song. Singing from the perspective of horror author H.P. Lovecraft being thrown into present-day New York City, Darnielle keeps his voice low and brooding and intense until he explodes in the third verse: “Woke up afraid of my own shadow/ Like, genuinely afraid/ Headed for the pawnshop to buy myself a switchblade.”

Another success is “Sept 15th 1983,” a retelling of the robbery and killing of reggae producer Michael James “Prince Far I” Williams. Giving a slight nod to reggae with a sparse, percussion-focused arrangement and a syncopated, rhythm guitar, Darnielle recounts the elegiac last moments of Williams’ life elegy with such calm — and with such a buoyant keyboard behind him — that it’s easy to miss the murder entirely.

More typical of Mountain Goats’ traditional aesthetic of percussive, heavy strumming and yelled vocals are “In The Craters of the Moon” and the album’s title track, the latter a prototypical Darnielle tale of nonchalant apocalypse, with the smug narrator loudly proclaiming, “I feel so proud when the reckoning arrives.”

Some of the songs blend together too much, and the orchestra occasionally overwhelms the material. And a few of the songs just don’t quite come together. “New Zion” has a modified riff taken from the Clash’s “Lost In The Supermarket” and isn’t so hot when it’s paired with Steely Dan jazz, while “Michael Myers Resplendent” is unforgivably cloying, even if the pose is ironic.

Still, the album rewards repeated listens, and although Heretic Pride doesn’t reach the high mark set by 2005’s The Sunset Tree, it still offers plenty for Mountain Goats fans to sink their teeth into.

 

3 1/2 stars out of 5