Heretic Pride

We Say...

Review by J. Edward Keyes

Since the first time John Darnielle hollered words onto a reel of Cr02 back in 1991, the pleasures of each Mountain Goats record have been dual. Darnielle has both the innate ability to craft a knockout hook from the barest of elements (early on, just a guitar and his voice) and the syntactic precision to write complex, well-rounded characters who often seem realer than, say, acquaintances and co-workers.

Alter one of those aspects and the equation becomes unstable. 2006's subdued Get Lonely was Darnielle's most polarizing release in years, largely because he'd deliberately dampened the wick of his powder keg excitability, attempting to achieve the same level of emotional devastation with a whisper that he normally does with a shout. Heretic Pride is hardly a backpedal so much as another in a series of re-directions, this one embracing the idea of expansion, both musically and lyrically. The songs on Heretic Pride are among the most deliberately ornamented of his career. Seasick violins groan beneath the magnificent "In the Craters of the Moon," pizzicato strings patter like rainfall across the top of "San Bernadino" and bloodshot reggae organ snakes up the center of "New Zion." It's been six years since Darnielle started utilizing instruments other than just a guitar, his voice and a tape recorder, but where previous experiments with orchestration felt like simple trimming, on Pride they've become essential elements.

More rewarding than the development of his musical palette is the fact that Darnielle's narrative skills have increased in depth and nuance with each successive release. On Pride he's at a zenith, finding elegant, inventive ways to express familiar emotions. In the title track he equates mortality with the taste of jasmine and summarizes his own emotional toxicity by sighing, "My heart's an autoclave." He doesn't just make small talk with a teenager, he talks to a "kid in a Marcus Allen jersey." Even when he allows for cliché, he dismantles it. Near the end of the amped-up "Lovecraft in Brooklyn" he lets slip, "I woke up afraid of my own shadow," but then counter-punches with, "Like, genuinely afraid." His insistence turns the expression from shopworn to genuinely startling.

The album closes with "Michael Myers Resplendent," a kind of elegy and doxology all at once. It starts slow, funereal piano spinning groggy loops, but it works its way up to a thundering chorus. The drums kick in and the violins saw and Darnielle sings: "The fire's bright/ and the frame's tight/ try to get right…/ and when the house goes up in flames/ no one emerges triumphantly from it." Like the best Darnielle moments, it's vivid and harrowing and hopeful. And, like the best Darnielle moments, you know the exact feeling he's talking about.