By Don Allred
(As first heard by this reporter on C-90s in the mid-90s, Mountain Goats tracks were rough-and-ready dispatches from a traveler always in the middle of something, memories and scenes happening now, unfazed by complicated landscapes, sometimes banging an acoustic guitar in what sounded like a park, with recruits chirping on cue, or even coming over the mountains on a flying picnic blanket with his latest finds, if you found yourself leaning out far enough to hear him that way, which could happen more than once.)
Mountain Goats leader John Darnielle is a frequently bespectacled, folk-rocking poet of song, and also a decidedly non-ironic death metal gourmet. Confirming his rep for real talk, the sociable Mr D. helpfully points out that if you don’t crave death metal’s “Cookie Monster” vocals (not like his, but the ones that sound like the results of bong hits from a vacuum cleaner), well, then you---just may not be so metal after all.
As for Darnielle, he still savors the moment he encountered the term “occult blood” in his nursing manual. “ ‘Occult’ just means ‘hidden’ or ‘not immediately obvious’ in medical terminology. I thought it was the greatest thing I’d ever heard.” Becoming a death-metal-loving psychiatric nurse may have inspired some of Darnielle’s songs, but they don’t seem exploitative. His nameless first- person narrator, eternally strumming and spinning through everyday purgatory and paradise, is both a penitent and rebel, beyond contradiction. The robust, combustible emotional range of spring-heeled Mountain Goats melodies never leaves much room for error, but the new All Eternals Deck takes an especially risky turn through what could easily settle into morbid clichés, or lectures about them.
Instead, Darnielle confidentially confesses the costly allure of---call it superstition, religion, underground political activities, science fiction, forbidden facts---in the secret living history of this age, or any other, without waiting for the Web to catch up. Dynamic chamber rock is a night nurse for the album’s charged atmospheres and spooked vitality. Certain truths about yourself and others might well be too much (and/or too little) information, though Darnielle’s characters can and will take it. As he (currently) reads their kind’s fortune (commenting on 1979 near-future prophet-driven teen gang movie The Warriors), “The sun’s coming up and they’re safe, but you know the scars are permanent now.”
Though certainty certainly can get old---so, for this tour, perennial bassist Peter Hughes issues an advisory: the MGs have thrown away the setlist of material they relied on for years. Instead, we’ll get many “ ...new songs, old songs that haven't been performed in years and never with a full band, old songs that have never been performed, period.” The “full band” now includes ace guitarist-keyboard player Yuval Semo, also the arranger of All Eternal Deck ’s eerie, silky strings. Nevertheless, adds Hughes, “Most of these songs, we'd really only had a chance to run through a handful of times.”
Furthering the adventurous potential of this evening, veteran Mountain Goats (and Superchunk) drummer Jon Wurster, also of the radio satire/prankster unit Scharpling & Wurster, will materialize at the Wexner Center Store from 7:30-9:00 p.m., to sign his comedy CDs and bond with the public. Brace yourselves.
The Mountain Goats will be performing with supporting band Megafaun at theWexner Center Performance Space on Monday, April 11. The show starts at 9 p.m. $16 all audiences. For more information, please visit www.mountain-goats.com or www.wexarts.org.
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