Mountain Goats – Heretic Pride
John Darnielle has been sketching out a stubborn, frenetic career arc for seventeen years now, and he’s been successful enough that the top result on a Google search for “mountain goats” gives you him (instead of, you know, mountain goats). But the same things that get him noticed have kept him at cult stature: his smart lyrics, his nasal yawp, and his prickly insistence on doing things his way.
That self-determination is still very much in evidence on Heretic Pride, the 15th or 16th or God knows exactly how many Mountain Goats albums there have been. This is his first in two years, and it shows how comfortable the former lo-fi DIY-er has become with full-band, warm-toned production. The most prominent instrument is Erik Friedlander’s cello, which is elegiac sometimes and ominous others, but there are also loud drums and moments of unabashed grandeur.
For all the evolutionary shifts, Heretic Pride won’t particularly surprise Darnielle’s fans; it won’t disappoint them either. Lyrically, it draws on his familiar smorgasbord of fable, confession, pop-culture anthropology (H.P. Lovecraft, slasher films, Prince Far I), paranoia, ecstasy and hurt feelings. He’s as word-nerdy as ever: Not many songwriters would write “My heart’s an autoclave,” and not many singers could make it sound less than awkward. Darnielle manages both.
His singing, by the way, is a beneficiary of his move away from bedroom production. No longer needing to squawk to be heard, he often takes a softer, more intimate tone. And his origamic melodies reveal their folds over multiple listens; there are a lot of pretty tunes here. Including the one about the Chinese lake monster.