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The Mountain Goats By Jim Fisher
[written summer 2003]
A former psychiatric nurse takes the stage at San Francisco's Bottom of the Hill with a glass of scotch and an acoustic guitar. Wearing a black T-shirt that reads "Rehab is for losers," he stares down at the crowd with close-set eyes and prominent ears.
"Hi," he says finally. "We're The Mountain Goats."
A solitary fan with a portable cassette recorder raises a microphone towards the stage, and punches a button near his hip. Judging from other bootlegs being traded online, the fidelity will be awful, but sound quality is not the point. The singer, after all, is John Darnielle, an artist otherwise known as The Mountain Goats, who has built an underground, multinational following around his unmistakably-articulated song-poems (so far, he has recorded upwards of 400) the majority of which were taped straight to cassette on a Panasonic boombox.
"I play an acoustic guitar," Darnielle has said, "but I am not one of those guys with an acoustic guitar."
Darnielle sips his drink, and starts to sing in a piercing nasal tenor, accompanied solely by vigorous, percussive strumming. His famously charged lyrics quickly draw the audience into a scene where an old voice crackles through the static of an AM radio station during an early morning storm, soothing an estranged husband but waking up his sleeping wife, who ties back her hair and punches out the windows of their house. End of song.
A few songs later, Darnielle is joined onstage by Peter Hughes, who collaborated with Darnielle on The Mountain Goats' most recent album, "Tallahassee." [Another album, "We Shall All Be Healed," has been released since this piece's writing.] Released last November on the legendary indie label 4AD (Pixies, Throwing Muses, Cocteau Twins), "Tallahassee" is the first Mountain Goats album recorded entirely in the studio and with a traditionally-instrumented rock band; in the course of 14 songs, it quite possibly sets down more instrument tracks than in all the Goats' previous recordings combined. And that's saying a lot, considering that the discography since 1991 spans more than 30 titles and a dozen full-length releases.
It is telling, however, that no one is accusing Darnielle of betraying his roots: neither longtime fans of The Mountain Goats -- and there are more out there than you'd think, buying up everything the project releases and posting bootlegs and lyrics at themountaingoats.net -- nor the independent music critics who have followed Darnielle's career for the past decade. Part of the reason is that "Tallahassee" is actually far less of a break from the Mountain Goats' body of work than the abrupt change in production choices might suggest. The songs of "Tallahassee" are founded on those that precede them, tracing the final, desperate movements of a fictional couple -- known to fans as "the alpha couple" because of the presence of the word "alpha" in the titles of most songs about the pair -- who've been hurtling toward divorce ever since their first appearance in a short song called "Alpha Double Negative: Going to Catalina" from the Mountain Goats' very first release ("Songs for Petronius," vinyl 7" EP, Shrimper, 1992).
That a performer's lyrical universe can be so strongly, persuasively realized as to create the illusion of continuity between a studio-intensive project like "Tallahassee" and the lo-fi catalog that precedes it says quite a bit about the driving force of a Mountain Goats song. Even for a singer/songwriter, Darnielle has an imagination that's overwhelmingly verbal: he uses the repetition of chord progressions much as a formally-trained poet uses metrical structure, to tease out and describe a vivid, interior landscape.
"Good poetry, for me, should make the reader flinch," he insists, moving nervously around the rooftop dressing room at tbe Bottom of the Hill. "Not necessarily because of its unpleasant subject matter, but because of its closeness to reality. I don't think any art form manages to echo what life is like better than poems do, especially poems as songs -- which to me are the same things."
Song-poems, of course, have traditionally been the province of folksingers, and while Darnielle resists the classification, in some interviews he'll give in and describe his work as "folk music with a hammer," conjuring up the steel-driving John Henry of American balladry and his legendary contest with a steam drill -- an apt metaphor for lo-fi production choices in an age of MIDI synthesizers and computer-monitored mixing consoles. At other times, as in an interview with the online artzine neumu.net, he seems determined to confound musical categories altogether: "I play the kind of punk rock music that has existed since the time of the great painters in the caves at Lascaux," he explains.
While "Tallahassee" is not the most accomplished of Darnielle's lyrical work in recent years, it follows on the heels of a pair of masterful concept albums, "The Coroner's Gambit" (2000) and "All Hail West Texas" (2001), which taken as a loose trilogy suggest that Mountain Goats are moving toward a larger, more orchestrated sound, as if in search of the musical lift necessary to carry more ambitious lyrical projects. The haunting dimensionality awakened in the five studio tracks on 2000's "The Coroner's Gambit" seems to be leading Darnielle into a more complicated process of composition, taking the songwriter further into his own interior universe. "Tallahassee" may not be the all-studio triumph fans had hoped for, but there's little doubt that one is on its way, with instrumentation as manifold as the Mountain Goats themselves.
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The Mountain Goats recorded their first songs in 1991 while Darnielle was working as a psychiatric nurse in Southern California. The work circulated on cassette tapes which eventually came to the attention of the underground label Shrimper, which issued Darnielle's first release, 1992's 5-song vinyl 7" "Songs for Petronius," addressed to Nero's ill-fated Arbiter of Taste and author of the Satyricon.
For the five years following "Songs for Petronius," the Mountain Goats appeared on countless underground lo-fi compilation cassettes and vinyl 7"s and LPs, while continuing to issue cassettes and vinyl of their own at the rate of about three a year. The pace peaked in 1995 with appearances on no less than nine compilation recordings and the release of five all-Mountain Goats titles: "Songs About Fire" (4-song 7"), "Songs for Peter Hughes" (4-song 7"), "Orange Raja, Blood Royal" (4-song 7"), "Nine Black Poppies" (9-song LP), and the extended song-cycle "Sweden" (19-song LP). One can hear on some of the earlier songs the backing vocals of five amateur female singers known only as the "Bright Mountain Choir," while the later releases, notably "Nine Black Poppies" and "Sweden," feature a mix of boombox- and studio-recorded songs with the bass lines and sweetly off-key backing vocals of Rachel Ware.
Nonetheless, the recurring and characteristic sound of these albums is Darnielle's vigorous, rhythmic strumming and clearly-enunciated lyrics, sung in a piercing nasal tenor that cuts through the ambient tape noise of the boombox. One hears the click of the "Record" button being pressed, the hiss of the cassette, and the changing acoustics of Darnielle's own voice, depending on how close he's chosen to seat himself from the electronics. Above all, one hears the wheel-grind, that omnipresent lurching of the spool gears -- a result of the built-in microphone having been situated too close to the tape-playing mechanism.
Songs begin with acts of God: "First thing that happened was a river overflowed"; "Let the stars come out, and the moon shine bright / We're sleeping on the porch tonight / Wind blew all the power lines down / Watch where you step if you go walking around." Characters are summoned up in a matter of seconds: "That fifteen thousand dollars / That turned up in your purse / You've done something awful / I've done something worse." Questions are raised about just what sort of species is being addressed: "I get letters telling me since I moved away / You've taken to hanging out on that rock about a mile from shore." Doomed relationships are summed up in two lines: "I know you hate it when I get my headaches / Well I've got a real prize tonight."
We don't always follow characters, however; sometimes we follow the lyric itself as it metamorphoses into animals, shimmies up trees, or heads north toward Alaska "where there's snow to suck the sound out from the air." We hear it describe the continent eroding, or the rising flames of burning ships 73 years before the start of the Christian era. We hear the singer's heart become an onion rising up in his throat with the first spring thaws. We are warmed by a western sun that always seems to be sending out "signals" as it sets; we hear the old songs of Bacchus crackle through transistor radio static. Above all, we hear the strumming and that unmistakable nasal tenor, and we are made aware of every word that is sung.
That strumming, that voice, and those lyrics form the heart of the Mountain Goats song. This does not preclude musical collaborations (in fact, some of the Goats' best songs include an overlay of bass or violin), but every sound must follow the beat of that tripartite heart for the poetry of the song to survive. This has led many reviewers, against the protests of Darnielle, to reduce the entire Mountain Goats output as the work of "one guy alone in his living room," but they have a point: one is responding not so much to the music as to the primitive imagination of one guy alone somewhere -- bedroom? mountaintop? -- being carried by a few strummed chords into a landscape entirely his own, and then describing what he sees.
Take the song "Papagallo," originally off of the 4-song 7" "Songs About Fire" and now included on "Ghana," one of three-reissue anthologies from 3 Beads of Sweat. The fidelity is particularly deplorable on this cut, with the bass and treble ranges merging into a crashing static roar. No matter: the song works, especially if you share a certain receptivity to images of humans transmuting into birds. "You were standing by the water / When the wind whipped through," it begins:
There was a darkened sky reflected on the river
The only sound besides the voice of the singer is the vibration of the steel strings in poorly-formed chords, and the simple, repetitive melody played on what sounds like a single string. But the words, as with all Mountain Goats songs, make it through the imperfections of the recording intact, so that one is slowly, inexorably pulled into a scene whose main influences are not so much musical as poetic:
You were standing near the water
The released divinity is a "pure song" whose words the singer recognizes, and which transforms the figure by the river into a bird (presumably the "papagallo," or macaw, of the song's title). The strumming then becomes more violent, the single steel string melody repeats itself a few more times, and the song ends. It ends because the singer has reached the end of a specific, mythopoetic encounter, whose low hills and boiling river have more in common with the phantasmagoric landscape of, say, Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" than any music one chooses to name. This is a poem, and it is influenced, in the end, more by other poems than it is influenced by popular song.
Poems, however, tend to have a far smaller -- though arguably more passionate -- audience than popular music, so it's not surprising that the Mountain Goats have become, as one critic observes, "a boutiquer's taste: a little something for a highly specialized portion of the population, but hardly a crowd-pleaser in any sense of the word." For the same reasons, it's also not surprising that the Mountain Goats have done their share of offending and baffling sensibilities. One reviewer at the online music publication Pitchfork Media writes of a re-issued rarities anthology, "This album is rotten with lyrics and music that nobody should be able to get away with," but then concedes, with a certain petulance, that "John Darnielle has the singular ability to sing lines that nobody should be able to sing straight-faced and make them sound simultaneously absurd, melancholy, and absolutely beautiful." I would agree, but I think the real point being made here -- which even lovers of poetry will probably agree with -- is that nobody should be allowed to recite their own poetry straight-faced. Inexplicably, a few people pull it off. This is why we listen.
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For all this, one shouldn't assume that Mountain Goats lyrics always stand alone as poetry, at least not without some initial chords to summon up the images moving inside the words. The result in a curious variation on getting a song "stuck in your head," because once those words have been carried from singer to listener, the quality of the song that sticks in the mind is not a melody, but an image. These are not tunes, but runes: a listener can go for days unable to shake the picture of a young Danish man sitting at the edge of some mythical marsh ("Tollund Man," from "Sweden"); of shortwave radios on a bookshelf inexplicably left playing all day in Calcutta ("We Were Patriots," from "The Coroner's Gambit"); or of an equally inexplicable monkey in a basement ("The Monkey Song," Philyra): "There's a monkey in the basement / Where did the monkey come from? / There's a monkey in the basement / How did the monkey get there?"
One of the Mountain Goats' early triumphs of smuggling verse into music occurs in "Song for Cleomenes" on 1993's "Beautiful Rat Sunset." (Incidentally, the liner notes for this album -- which shares with so many of the releases of the early 1990s a studied preoccupation with classical history -- show off some of Darnielle's prankster sense of humor: he thanks Aeschylus in the acknowledgements, adding humbly, "Although he probably would have found this record confusing on a number of levels.")
The song is primarily spoken narration, carried along by a repetitive, forceful chord progression, cut with strokes of the pick on muted strings. One might almost call it a Mountain Goats' take on a talking blues, although instead of describing a long, luckless drive from the Dust Bowl to Califonia (Guthrie), or an apocalyptic nightmare about World War III (Dylan), it summarizes some of the first famous orations of Cicero from his prosecution of the diabolical Sicilian praetor Caius Verres.
This in itself is quite a feat of synopsis, but by the end of the song, it turns out that the entire narration was a way of easing the listener back to a specific moment in the 7th decade B.C, in which a fleet of Roman merchant ships led by a craven, cuckolded Syracusan named Cleomenes, husband to one of Verres' paramours, is overtaken by a band of pirates, driven aground at Sicily and then burned -- a crime committed at the bidding of Verres, who watches the fires from a tent on the shore, drinking with the pirates and making love to Cleomenes' wife. It is the scene Darnielle's been driving at. He stops talking and sings, lifting us into the rising flames of Verres' destructive lust:
For a moment, both singer and listener have been transported twenty centuries into the past, watching the beautiful, fiery spectacle with a dancing band of pirates, while hearing in the distance the "old songs" being led, presumably, by cloven-hooved Bacchus himself. It's a trick Darnielle may have picked up from a Roman lyric poet of the same era, to whom he addressed another 1993 release, the 10-song cassette "Transmissions to Horace." Just as Darnielle frequently launches himself in song centuries into the past, so does Horace explicitly cast himself centuries into the future, such as in the following ode that provides some background on the choice of the mountain goat as Darnielle's alter-ego:
I saw Bacchus himself -- oh believe me, men in
One does not want to take this link too far -- certainly Darnielle is no rival of Horace -- but the comparison is instructive. In the same way that Horace employs metrical structure (for which the strings of his lyre are both a literal and figurative accompaniment) to quicken his poetic imagination, Darnielle uses chord progressions. He is, after all, writing lyrics, and there is perhaps no picture that better approximates what's going on than that of the old Roman poet on his Sabine farm composing verses while plucking on his lyre.
The landscape brought forth by Darnielle's music is a place where young bacchants, lost in the forest, are taunted by talking fire-bellied toads about what toads can do that young bacchants, being human, can't. It is a place where father ghosts come on like electrical storms, knocking down power lines and frightening off livestock; where doomed, drug-addicted couples drive endlessly across the country arguing over the radio and falling asleep on motel lawns. It is a place where fallen high-school running backs are selling acid; where lonely men are talking to snakes in the trees; and where hallucinating drifters are returning to Atlanta to die. It is a place where desperate people travel to Santiago in the wake of a breakup, and then lock their keys in the car on a jungle road; a place where alcoholics bond with a can of boiled peanuts, where cloven hoofprints turn up in gardens and "old songs" -- always beautiful, often evil -- are forever crackling through transistor radio static. Above all, it is a landscape capable of being transmitted over primitive recording technologies with a minimum of instrumentation. This is, after all, a lyrical universe, and the fidelity requirements for reproducing human speech are far more forgiving than for musical arrangements. This seems to have been the implicit argument of Darnielle's deliberately lo-fi recording all along. If the emotional force of a song can make it through the wheel-grind, distortion, and cassette hiss intact, can we really say that the song is being carried by the music? Or is it the other way around?
-----------------
To return to a critique of the Mountain Goats' most recent release, "Tallahassee," I'll confess that I'd have to place it several levels below Darnielle's best work. Given his historical emphasis on lo-fi recording, it is tempting to attribute the album's weaknesses to the move into the studio, when in fact the problem lies in the overly-developed level of detail brought to the lyrics. Darnielle's words are strongest as suggestion, when just a few apt lines summon up some fully-formed character in the mind of the listener. (A good example is the song about the Alpha couple's final split, "Alpha Omega," which describes, with an almost carnal sense of relief, the husband's first breakfast alone -- boiled peanuts -- on the day his wife finally leaves.) This uncanny power of suggestion is lost when an album becomes as high-concept as "Tallahassee." Less is left to the imagination, and the destructive, alchoholic couple forever on the cusp of divorce occasionally crosses the line separating archetype from caricature.
According to Darnielle, the album was originally conceived as a way of "setting these people [the Alpha couple] who I'd been writing about forever in a more lush setting, and put some real meat on their bones -- make them more flesh-and-bone characters." While this conceptual principle works well on the album's microsite, elegantly designed by graphic artist Lalitree Darnielle (John's wife) and reproducing not only a complete floorplan of the Florida house, but notes from concerned neighbors, cryptic excerpts from the husband's journals, and annotated contents of the couple's opiate-laden medicine cabinet, it becomes prescriptive when it comes to writing lyrics, or at least the kind of lyrics the Mountain Goats write best. The relentless layering on of detail results in too may easy similes and forced images that suggest Darnielle may be hitting some creative limits with his material. While we get some nice lines about swamps, cyclones and Louisiana graveyards, we also hear the stars of the Milky Way compared to, well, milk, and are offered the careless tautology of "The fire engines / I dream of when I dream" coupled with a rhyme about waking up and trying -- anyone? -- "not to scream."
Fortunately, "Tallahassee" is finally a Mountain Goats album musically complex enough to carry the lyrics over some rough patches, rather than the other way around. Peter Hughes adds an elegant bass line to "First Few Desperate Hours" and "Southern Plantation Road," and the cheerful piano work of Franklin Bruno (with whom Darnielle occasionally collaborates on a side project, The Extra Glenns) nicely accentuates the desperate sarcasm of the husband's singalong song of hate, "No Children."
As a point of contrast to "Tallahasee," consider "The Coroner's Gambit" (2000), an album which took an unprecedented three years to write and record, enough time for several generations to pass in the imagination of an artist as prolific as Darnielle. Although as much of a concept album as "Tallahassee" -- the sixteen songs constitute a cycle of stories and lyrical cries to, from, and at the brink of the grave, held together by a master narrative of Elijah, the Tishbite prophet taken into heaven in a whirlwind in 2 Kings and leaving a "double portion of his spirit" to his disciple Elisha -- "The Coroner's Gambit" is never prescriptive about its theme, leaving just enough uncertainty lingering between the songs to compel listeners to complete the metaphysical narrative for themselves. The songs are so ripe for interpretation, in fact, that the LP and CD releases include the songs in alternative sequences, each with a viable logic of their own.
On top of this, the album gives The Mountain Goats a chance to prove that multiple instruments and a studio treatment can, in fact, add dimensionality to Darnielle's lyrical imagination. The five studio tracks -- "Elijah," "Baboon," "Horseradish Road," "Alphonse Mambo" and "Onions" -- are some of the most intricate and evocative sound objects The Mountain Goats have ever recorded. The centerpiece is "Onions," conveying the return of spring with an image of the singer's heart as an onion in his throat, and a violin climbing, then falling, then climbing again. To my ear it is the finest song ever to emerge from the vegetable imagination of Darnielle, and the studio touches -- the climbing violin, the rooting electric guitar, the death rattle in the background after the final refrain -- might be enough to persuade an artist to make a break with his lo-fi past, and follow the lyric into the studio to seek out more complex accompaniments.
Sure enough, in the liner notes to the all-boombox album which followed, "All Hail West Texas," Darnielle recounts hauling the original Panasonic FT-500 boombox from the closet for one final session before sending it the way of all consumer electronics. The tracks are story songs of consummate control, with cuts like "The Best Ever Death Metal Band out of Denton" and "The Fall of the Star High School Running Back" standing as quintessential examples of the ballad-like narrative economy Darnielle has honed over a decade of performing before the Panasonic's built-in microphone. One has the sense that Darnielle is saying goodbye to more than just an ailing machine.
It may be too early to say that Darnielle has exhausted the musical possibilities of the boombox, but there is no question that he has begun to compose with the studio in mind. Give him another prolific decade -- he's well into one already, having just recorded his second album for 4AD earlier this month -- and an all-studio masterpiece on par with "The Coroner's Gambit" or "All Hail West Texas" is certain to emerge. We'll be listening.
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