Review: The Mountain Goats - Heretic Pride

In an effort to bolster my ability to write album reviews, which I have not done in the year since my fruitful stint at the GW Hatchet ended, I will be -- you guessed it! -- writing album reviews. Initially, my goal was to do this once every week for a new and/or obscure album, and I'd like to stick to this starting today.

Two months ago, Pitchfork Media's notoriously critical reviewers gave the breakdown on Heretic Pride, the latest release from The Mountain Goats. Headed by quirky staccato singer John Darnielle, Goats has a unique sound in an indie market that is oversaturated with acoustic singersongwriter types. What makes the difference, without a doubt, are his completely out-of-left-field vocals and his blunt narratives.

Darnielle babbles completely coherently about so many topics it will make your head spin: war, death, love, spies, religion, pride, redemption, apocalypse, sex, childhood, and even alien invasion...and not once does he lose the attention of the listener. Aside form a few weak spots (namely the 'Puff The Magic Dragon'-esque "Tianchi Lake" and "Swamp Creature"), it was difficult to pick what to focus on since it was all so riveting and beautiful, but here are some highlights:

Sax Rohmer #1 (Track 1): This song is the most explosive that an acoustic rock song can possibly be. The build just blows my mind. Darnielle starts simply enough, with a basic muted strum (more on this later) and light vocals, but by the second half of the first verse you can already feel the tension creeping in. Electric guitar starts to flow all around the chords, drums start to come in from the bottom up, and by the time the first chorus arrives, Darnielle is belting the oddly meaningful "I am coming home to you, with my own blood in my mouth" at the top of his very limited (but not limiting) range. And, given his quirky yet satisfying vocal ability, it hits my heart like a ton of bricks. I still can't figure out why.

San Bernadino (Track 2): "You got in the warm warm water, I pulled the petals from my pocket. I loved you so much just then." The frankness of the lyric is the essence of Darnielle's ability to tell his story quickly and easily, and make you feel how deeply true it is.

So Desperate (Track 6): There is not a solitary defining lyrical or musical moment to this song, but only because it reaches bare-bones perfection. The same few chords are repeated throughout, and the chorus contains only seven words ("I felt so desperate in your arms"), but these act in perfect, uncomplicated unison to signify the love Darnielle eloquently narrates.

In The Craters On The Moon (Track 7): Two old cowboys saunter to the center of town, surrounded by the old saloon and general store, their spurs jangling and boots crunching the dusty rocks. Tumbleweeds scurry across the barren landscape, vultures circle overhead and call out in anticipation of inevitable death, and aside from their cries the town is tensely, silently awaiting the impending duel. From note-one, "Craters" feels musically like the Old West, and lyrically like a war-driven topical powerhouse. Darnielle frantically and frustratedly matches his vocals to the drums, which standout dynamically for one of the only times on the album (in a good way), especially during the timelessly relevant refrain, "In the declining years of the long war," which is delivered much more effectively than it looks on paper (or on screen).

And that's how this album can be defined...with light and sharply delivered vocals that never seem to match Darnielle's incisive and deeply personal (though not autobiographical) lyrics. Of course, I have one overarching complaint that applies to almost every song, and it is the 'basic muted strum' that I referenced earlier. Rhythmically, the album has virtually no variation at all. The accented notes in Darnielle's strumming pattern on 9 of the 13 tracks all fall on the same beats (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +). This might not make sense if you've never played the drums or taken a music theory class, but essentially this means that most songs after the first are rhythmically identical to the ones before it. If Darnielle did this intentionally, a rhythmic theme is a stroke of genius. If it was an oversight on his part, it was a massive one. Luckily, it hardly takes anything away from the album as a whole. After a dozen listens, each one more pleasant than the last, I can once again say Pitchfork has led me in the right direction.

And so I hope to lead you there, as well. Buy it if you can, steal it if you can't, and enjoy it either way.

Novelty For Novelty's Sake

Once upon a time, say about 45 years ago, society underwent an unprecedented shift in what it found musically acceptable. I refer, of course, to The Beatles and their final act of manifest destiny in moving rock music into the mainstream. Specifically, 1968's The Beatles (A.K.A. - The White Album) moved musical mountains when it was released to the rock-hungry public. Though it was one of their last albums, it is certainly their most diverse (A.K.A. - eclectic) and surprising, given references to Baroque Era classical ('Piggies'), country-western ('Rocky Racoon'), and even ragtime ('Honey Pie'). Its 30 tracks run a staggering 93 minutes long, but somehow it wasn't overdone. It was tasteful and, more importantly, it made use of new musical techniques ('Revolution 9') and singlehandedly birthed a new sub-genre of rock ('Helter Skelter').

Once upon another time, only 5 years ago, Jay-Z released The Black Album to mounds of critical acclaim and hype because it was his "last studio album" (until 2006, when he predictably unretired and released another one). It may not have been as revolutionary as its juxtaposed predecessor, and it may not have even been original since no fewer than six albums were titled The Black Album before 2003, but it was good enough for Danger Mouse to find it worthy of a "mash-up" with said predecessor. And so, in 2004, with licensed a capella tracks from Jay-Z and pirated tracks from The Beatles, The Grey Album was distributed online through various file-sharing services and became an immediate and everlasting sensation (the oh-so-wise Entertainment Weekly even had the cojones to name it the "Best Album of 2004"). There's one problem, though: IT'S NOT GOOD.

Just doing something new for the sake of novelty does not automatically make it worthwhile. There is so much wrong about The Grey Album that I hardly know where to begin. It is terribly mixed, which is understandable since it was never officially released due to lawsuits (which resulted from the pirated Beatles tracks). Still, though, for people to heap so much praise on something as unproduced and rough-draftish as this is very telling as to how little attention is actually paid to quality when an album is revered simply for being "fresh."

What the album lacks in production quality, it does not make up for in substance. I do not consider myself any sort of expert on Jay-Z, but I do consider myself an amateur Beatles historian. I can often be an elitist or purist about things like the greatest band ever, so forgive me if I sound unforgiving, but I simply don't think that the slow, stringy sorrow of "Long, Long, Long" belongs within 100 yards of "Public Service Announcement" (a restraining-order-worthy offense), or that the undeniable classic "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" should even be mentioned in the same sentence as "What More Can I Say" (one of the worst efforts on Grey), let alone combined with it. The mash of "99 Problems" with "Helter Skelter" is the standalone quality track on the album, and only because Danger Mouse decided to use only two measures of "Helter Skelter" (the drum lead-in) to act as the beat behind Jay-Z's hook, "I got 99 problems, but a bitch ain't one."

In the past I've often lauded artists for combining new and old styles (Feist's Let It Die) or returning to their musical roots (Radiohead's In Rainbows) or even reinventing themselves completely (Bright Eyes' Cassadaga), but the combination of White and Black into Grey is something that attempts to do all three and fails each time.

The purist in me says that The Beatles are at the root of all boundary-breaking pop/rock music that has been made since the mid-to-late 1960s, so Danger Mouse was making a daring attempt to connect one of the newest musical styles with the band that in some ways gave birth to it. By altering the work of either artist, he has rendered his efforts virtually pointless. Because of the distorted, slowed down, and sped up samples that he uses from The Beatles' tracks, he is essentially distorting the purpose of the entire project: an unadulterated combination of new and old, a return to the roots of contemporary music, and a reinvention of both The White Album and The Black Album.

Given these failures, the attempt to combine a timeless musical landmark with a new trend was an exercise in egotism and shock-value by Danger Mouse. He took two artists that are beloved by at least two generations of music lovers and tried to force them together like two random jigsaw pieces based solely on the fact that the latter's title is an allusion to that of the former. And, what's worse, it worked! He duped millions of people into thinking that The Grey Album is a masterwork of technological prowess, when in reality it was novelty for novelty's sake. He is the Howard Stern of mash-ups. It might seem impressive and even important on a superficial level, but if you take the time to listen -- to really listen -- it's impossible to avoid the clear conclusion that the standalone brilliance of each album should have remained just that.