Mountain Goats, Heretic Pride, 4AD
Who’s responsible for the state of the Mountain Goats in Heretic Pride? Overproduced and with lyrics that would make high schoolers at a Battle of the Bands blush, this once-fantastic band has released a lamentable album, and someone must be to blame.
John Vanderslice, the album’s producer and a successful musician himself, is an obvious culprit. His fondness for multiple, layered instruments has seduced the band’s lead singer (and only permanent member) John Darnielle, who upgraded all at once from a droning tape recorder and an acoustic guitar to a piano, cello and electric guitar. With all the unnecessary noise on each song, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that a zydeco band shared the studio during recording. But Vanderslice makes good music when he’s away from the Mountain Goats, so he’s exonerated.
A better case can be made against Darnielle. His creative exhaustion is exemplified by “Autoclave,” which features a stanza beginning with a pile of skulls and ending with the banal “sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name.” After producing some of the best albums of the early 21st century, Darnielle is reduced to spraying sitcom chestnuts.
Yet his lyrics still salvage parts of the album. He’s at his best when he’s singing about other people, as when he summons the murdered Rastafarian musician Prince Far I with Caribbean drums in “September 15 1983” or uses the eponymous author’s adventure novels to sketch a delayed romance in “Sax Rohmer #1.”
The Mountain Goats even flirt with contemporary relevance in the title track, a discourse on the orgasm of martyrdom. “Heretic Pride” uses a piano and guitar to create a jaunty mood that still conveys the ecstasy of a suicide bomber or a poisoned Gnostic.
I blame Darnielle’s fans for the album’s shoddy quality. Enough people embraced his last record, the horrendous Get Lonely, that he wrote tedious songs for this album like “So Desperate,” in which he strums idly on his guitar and moans about being, as you might expect, “so desperate.” Like ventriloquists playing Marco Polo, the Mountain Goats’ fans have thrown their voice in the wrong direction and led Darnielle straight into a wall.
Heretic Pride is better than Get Lonely, but these days, new Mountain Goats albums are like the later Roman emperors: Hadrian was nice, and definitely no Caligula, but you know the Republic’s dead. And we’re responsible.
Voice’s Choices: “September 15 1983,” “Sax Rohmer #1,” “Heretic Pride”
