The Mountain Goats: Heretic Pride
Darnielle's Latest Full-Length Presents a triumphant Push forward.
Oct 22, 2008
Heretic Pride, the most recent album by the Mountain Goats, finds John Darnielle returning to a depersonalized song structure, lyrically more concerned with storytelling than exorcising private demons from a messy break-up or memories of a childhood of abuse.
The narratives he conveys are people with desperate, xenophobic and isolated characters; some of them are trapped in a moment of indecision, sheltered from the outside world because of their own narrow view or tenuous grasp they have on a relationship.
Heretic Pride : Themes and Sounds
Thematically, Heretic Pride is shot through with love and desire, with horror and misunderstanding, with apocalyptic glee and inescapable death. The sonic palette through which these themes are delivered is broader and more dramatic, incorporating more orchestral strings in the arrangements as well as louder drums, and dub bass.
"San Bernadino" : Love Makes a Get-Away Plan
On Heretic Pride as on nearly every Mountain Goats album, love is where desperation collides with isolation in moments of furtive beauty. The young parents flee to a hotel room on “San Bernadino,” where the father anoints his lover's bath with petals from his pocket, announcing “We will never be alone in this world no matter what they say.”
The violins and cello swoop around the rapidly plucked guitar strings and John's vocals like so much blood through a rapidly pulsing heart. These characters find solace and definition in their own solitude, in the way they wall themselves off from the world into which they hesitantly bring their new child.
"Autoclave" : A Warning
Darnielle's desperate lovers people other tracks like “Autoclave” where the central character warns the listener that he is a “great, unstable mass of blood on the phone and no one in her right mind would make my home her home;” the central conceit of the song being a heart as an autoclave, overheating and purifying emotions to the point they are sanitary and reformed.
Though the album feels more thematically scattered than previous “concept” albums like Tallahassee or The Sunset Tree what it lacks in lyrical connectedness in retains in a common sense of narrative drive. From the opener “Sax Rohmer #1” to the album's closing salvo “Michael Myers Resplendent,” Heretic Pride moves along at a fevered, inexorable pace, stopping and starting while Darnielle's characters try to catch their breath between paranoid and self-destructive rants; the single through-line that ties the disparate narrative threads together is a tone of beautifully articulated desperation.
Links
Official Site
Unofficial (but very helpful) Site
