Have you ever loved a record so much you’d throw yourself in front of a bullet to save it? Climb the steps of the gallows in its stead? Let it sleep in your bed and feed it chicken soup for a month to cure it from a bad case of the flu? I have, and it’s this one. Oh, sure, I have others, The Basement Tapes and perhaps the first album by The Band and maybe The Felice Brothers, but that’s it. The rest of them will just have to take the bullet and die in my arms.
John Darnielle, who is the Mountain Goats for all intents and purposes, hooked me with 2002’s All Hail West Texas and has never let go. I first saw him at SXSW, alone with an acoustic guitar in a cavernous dining hall, and my first impulse was to flee. I don’t do well with singers with acoustic guitars. They give me nightmares of Dave Van Ronk. But his astounding storytelling and ADD-hyper song delivery captivated me immediately, to the point where I ran out and bought West Texas, with its utterly brilliant opening track “The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton,” and I’ve been a wild-eyed disciple ever since.
Darnielle is bona fide smart, which isn’t always a help in the rock biz. But in his case he has turned it towards writing songs sharp enough to blind, story songs that will bend your head and fuck up your tear ducts forever. Take “No Children,” a song about a dissolving marriage that is as hilarious as it is touching. It’s less a song than a drowning, and so damn catchy you won’t mind there’s not a lifeguard in sight. Or “Best Ever Death Metal Band,” which is so indignant and perfectly constructed that you are 100 percent guaranteed to find yourself singing, “Hail Satan, tonight!” at its end.
Shit, the guy’s so smart he took one of those typically dull 33 1/3 books in which writers go off on their favorite album (his was Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality) and turned his into a novella, and a great novella at that. And he’s written a novel, Wolf in White Van, which was nominated for a National Book Award in 2014, to boot. Shit, I wouldn’t be surprised if he were to write a long and brilliant technical treatise on astronomy; he’s that kind of guy.
Since releasing his 1994 debut, Darnielle has worked with a slew of collaborators, although they’ve never altered his basic sound. Originally super lo-fi, as lo-fi as lo-fi as it gets, Darnielle gradually moved towards studio recordings. But with a full band or alone, Darnielle’s music is immediately recognizable, and on my favorite Mountain Goats’ LP, 2004’s We Shall all be Healed, he worked with John Vanderslice (producer), Franklin Bruno (piano), Peter Hughes (bass), Nora Danielson (violin), and Christopher McGuire (drums).
His eighth release, We Shall all be Healed is a concept album about Darnielle’s speed freak youth, and it mingles a sense of dread with outlaw defiance, insanity, paranoia, and everything else that goes along with being a methamphetamine addict. Darnielle gets all the details down perfectly, nails ‘em down with his precise but poetic lyrics, from the reflective tape on their sweat pants to the tweaker’s conviction that there’s a camera watching them through the ratty motel TV. “Higher than weather balloons” they go downtown, and get fucked up and fucked over and are going down, and each and every song is like a chapter in a novel written by one of the damned. “We’re all here chewing our tongues off/Waiting for the fever to break,” he sings on the mid-tempo “Letter From Belgium,” while on the great and propulsive “Palmcorder Yajna” he has a vision of mortality in the form of headstones climbing up the hills and dreams of “a house/Haunted by all you tweakers with your hands out.”
On opener “Slow West Vultures,” a lovely tune highlighting Darnielle’s manic strumming, he sings, “We are what we are/Get in the goddamn car,” and “We are sleek and beautiful/We are cursed,” setting the scene for the adventures of a motley crew who have nowhere to go but into the darkness. “Linda Blair Was Innocent” is a slow and lovely song about being “hungry for love/Ready to drown,” and it’s heartbreaking in its desolate beauty, while “The Young Thousands” is anthemic in sound but dark in its evocation of the downfall of a generation of meth heads, what with its ghosts learning to breathe and that dull pain which nothing can assuage. The melodic “Your Belgian Things” is elegiac in tone, and mysterious in content, as the men who have come to get those things are wearing biohazard suits. No one can evoke a sense of loss as well as Darnielle; “One way in/No way out” he sings, adding, “I wish I had a number where you are” and that he can see the song’s subject “walking gingerly across bruised earth.”
“Mole” is the LP’s only weak track, a crawling threnody about a friend in intensive care, handcuffed to the bed. In a sense it’s a précis of his role as the camera’s eye, “a mole sticking his head above the surface of the earth” to capture in his lens the needle and the damage done. Some piano comes in, it works its way to a kind of climax, and then it falters, and then comes the fast-paced “Home Again Garden Grove,” in which Darnielle sings about going home, hanging onto his notes as he sings and strumming his guitar like mad. He fantasizes a gangster existence while they search the streets for product, for what they need, and then he goes quiet and sober and thoughtful on “All Up the Seething Coast,” in which he sings, “And nothing you say or do won’t stop me/And a thousand dead friends won’t stop me” because he’s a man on a mission, “staring down strangers at the bus stop” and heaping huge piles of sugar on everything he eats. He won’t be saved, not if he can help it; this is his message of suicidal defiance, and he sings it without passion, in cold blood as it were.
“Quito” is a magnificent song of redemption, sung about his fantasies of a geographical cure. The lyrics are brilliant; “When I get off the wheel I’m going to stop/And make amends to everyone I’ve wounded/And when I wave my magic wand/ Those few who’ve slipped the surly bonds/Will rise like salmon at the spawning.” He’s going to get off the bus in Ecuador and drink an ice cold glass of water, and there’s going to be a celebration of deliverance, and he follows it with the beautiful “Cotton,” a song about rats escaping from a sinking ship and how he’s going to “let them all go,” referring to the cottons and the stick pins he left in the top drawer of a desk, and he uses the same metaphor, of a car with no driver, that I’ve always used to describe the days when I was wasted to the point where I saw myself climbing out of the driver’s seat and crawling into the back seat to await whatever fiery crash was coming my way.
“Against Pollution” is the album’s highlight, about his shooting a robber in a face during an attempted liquor store hold-up, and the melody throbs as he says he’d “do it again, do it again” at the same time he’s praying the rosary, and it includes perhaps the single moving lines about redemption and death I’ve ever heard, better than Tolstoy or Flannery O’Connor or E.M. Cioran: “When the last days come/We shall see visions/More vivid than sunsets/Brighter than stars/We will recognize each other/And see ourselves for the first time/The way we really are.” He announces the title of his last song, “Pigs That Ran Straightaway Into the Water, Triumph of,” an image he copped straight from Matthew 8:28-34, but skews it in such a way that you don’t know who triumphs, his sanity or the demons out to pursue him. He describes being sent away by prison bus in an orange jumpsuit to serve time, and his lyrics shift from pleading to defiance (“You think you hold the high hand/I’ve got my doubts/I come from Chino/Where the asphalt sprouts”) to fantasies of miraculous escape (“Let some mysterious chunk of space debris/Puncture the roof and set me free”).
And so ends the LP, with its blessings and its curses and its moments of remarkable transcendent beauty, and if such songs as “Quito” and “Against Pollution” and “Linda Blair Was Born Innocent” don’t move you, I despair of you. I did my very best to destroy myself via chemicals in my younger years, and this LP unerringly encapsulates that sense of setting yourself on fire like a Viking death ship while praying for deliverance, under your own breath as it were. There was a time (1979) when I knew I was dead, and I can recall spending a night making my peace with that fact in the back streets of my shitty college town with the winter stars wheeling overhead, but some part of me still hoped and it’s this hope that reigns o’er this triumphant album about pulling the earth from beneath your own feet and living to tell the tale, in prison orange or otherwise.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A+
