The Mountain Goats - 'Heretic Pride'

For every person, there is one artist that consistently puts out incredible work that, regardless of content, synchs up with wherever that listener is in life. The artist and the audience are in perfect sync. For some, this might mean Tori Amos, Modest Mouse, Bob Dylan, Dashboard Confessional, Jay-Z and so on. For me, it’s John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats.

Over his career, he has given me songs that made me choose life (“This Year”), choose love (“Going to Georgia”) and choose obsessive music collecting (over a dozen albums, three rarities compilations and a gajillion EPs and demos). He is a master of lyricism, and the only guy who has penned both “The best thing about you standing in the doorway is it’s you/And you are standing in the doorway” and “G-- damn/The pirate’s life for me!” But on his new record Heretic Pride, Darnielle has brought me something else to choose.

I just want to rock, man.

On Heretic Pride, Darnielle has finally managed to unite the fury of his early work with the full studio/band experience of his more recent work for label 4 A.D., and the result is pretty gosh dang awesome. Lead single “Sax Rohmer #1” opens the disc, and it instantly kicks away the doom and/or gloom of previous album Get Lonely. Not only does the music feel as propulsive as those hissingly lo-fi days, but Darnielle has switched back to fictional storytelling after a two-album stint detailing life with, and the death of, his abusive stepfather on The Sunset Tree and Get Lonely.

“Sax Rohmer #1” finds Darnielle’s protagonist traveling through pulp fiction-y scenery, much in the style of the author from whom the song takes its title. Alliteration abounds in the verses, but what hits the song into listeners’ heads will be the chorus: “I am coming home to you/With my own blood in my mouth/I am coming home to you/If it’s the last thing that I do.” Darnielle shouts these lines beautifully. Superchunk drummer Jon Wurster further enhances the tune, and everyone he performs on, with bombast through and through.

On “Lovecraft in Brooklyn,” another rockin’ tune, Darnielle does something that he rarely does: He goes electric. Like a rare white elk that happens to symbolize riff rock, “Lovecraft in Brooklyn” slinks, stuns and gets mildly psychedelic. Erik Friedlander’s string section imitates feedback, which is really cool to hear, and Wurster kills it yet again. Other classy tunes in this vein include “In the Craters on the Moon” and album-ender “Michael Myers Resplendent.”

Of course, if Heretic Pride consisted of 13 tracks of orchestral indie rock, heavy on the rock, things might get a bit dull. Friedlander pops up again to perform everything on “San Bernadino,” a lush folk tune about a young unmarried couple giving birth in a cheap motel, and his interpretation of Darnielle’s composition is stunning. It’s input from people like Friedlander, Wurster, St. Vincent’s Annie Clark and others that make Heretic Pride’s songs feel so warm. The results of these collaborations are amazing.

Other softer standouts include “Autoclave,” which is perhaps the closest the Goats have come to Head on the Door-like pop perfection. The narrator imagines his heart to be like an autoclave, a sterilizing instrument. Science is pretty much witchcraft to me, so I’m just going to pretend it can destroy intangible concepts like love and happiness. “So Desperate,” an acoustic tune about two people in love when they shouldn’t be—Darnielle repeats “I felt so desperate in your arms” throughout—is a gut-puncher. “Marduk T-Shirt Men’s Room Incident” relates a dirty, most likely sexual, experience. “I let myself imagine she was you,” the character says before running water over his hands hotter than he can bear, so great is his shame.

There’s more to discuss about Heretic Pride, like the subtle wisps of Jamaican music in tunes like “New Zion” and “Sept 15, 1983,” or the Mountain Goats’ stance on sea monsters in “Tianchi Lake,” but I’ll let you find those joys yourself. One last topic of discussion: the title track. The best song on the album, “Heretic Pride” is of the “you better play this live for the rest of your career” caliber. A story about a heretic about to be executed for, ya know, heresy, the narrator finds joy in his situation, which leads to the best lines of the entire album—“I feel so proud to be alive/I feel so proud when the reckoning arrives.”

Darnielle is great at writing affirmations, and this song is one of them. “Heretic Pride” is just that—pride and ecstasy over never breaking under societal norms, always standing for what one believes in, finding meaning in death. Everything clicks on this track. The band is in perfect unison and Darnielle’s descriptions in the verses make the tale vivid and alive.

It’s kind of early to be making this call, but I reckon Heretic Pride is in the running for best album of 2008. Filled with polychromatic emotion and expert musicianship, the record, and its creator, has yet again run the gamut of the human condition. A return to form in feeling and lyrical direction, Heretic Pride is a gem in The Mountain Goats’ discography and underground music in general.