The Mountain Goats (solo)
Last year at Bottom of the Hill, Mountain Goats delivered one of Noise Pop’s most satisfying shows. Group-singing abounded, panties were thrown onstage, the Spin photographers went crazy, and there were three encores—including a cover of “The Sign” by Ace of Base. John Darnielle came back onto the stage for the final encore, a rendition of The Best Metal Band to Come out of Denton, with a mouth full of hummus only because the audience had been stomping the ground and screaming like Beatles fans for several minutes. It was the type of encore that is demanded, not staged.
Mountain Goats is the musical entity of John Darnielle, a singer-songwriter in the cassette-trading scene before indie rock started to suffer from the sort of intellectual sprawl that puts Franz Ferdinand in the same category as your schizophrenic neighbor with a banjo.
No trendy sensation, this musical force has been surging through the indie circuit since the 90’s—albeit with 4-tracks and boom boxes. Beautiful Rat Sunset and Nothing for Juice are two of the many releases from the 90s era in which Mountain Goats made that which is most simple seem resplendent, both in sound and story. Lo-fi production of three-chord songs with conventional chorus-verse-chorus structure is humble bread for the lyrical meat of blood-letting that marries carnage and love.
Production became more sophisticated when Darnielle, now joined by bassist Peter Hughes, signed on with 4AD Records to release the albums that transported Mountain Goats from obscure might-be-giants to critically and popularly accepted icons within the kind-of-counter-culture that has remained. We Shall All Be Healed, The Sunset Tree and Get Lonely were released between 2004-2006 and displayed tenacious efforts to deliver rage worthy of death metal (an obsession of Darnielle’s) through the more subtle mediums of acoustic rock and even folk.
Mountain Goats put out Heretic Pride last year, an album produced by Scott Solter and San Francisco’s own John Vanderslice. This album is schizophrenic in its presentation of characters, from the pulp spy novelist Sax Rohmer (which includes vocals by St. Vincent’s Annie Clark) to the Tianchi Lake Monster of China. These songs, together with the Satanic Messiah EP (free for download online), will likely be prominent at this year’s performances.
This loose delivery may be the reason that Mountain Goats can continue to release such an abundance of material, and it might also be what makes their shows so high-velocity. It would normally seem unlikely for a group to top that Bottom of the Hill last year—three encores; a room full of people screaming, ”I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me”; group acceptance of Ace of Base. But then again, Mountain Goats have been surpassing themselves since many of their fans were wearing Ninja Turtles underwear—and not even in an ironic way. JENNA HUMPHREY
