Mountain Goats
The Coroner's Gambit
[Absolutely Kosher]
Rating: 8.5
The Mountain Goats have long been considered a boutiquer's taste: a little
something for a highly specialized portion of the population, but hardly a
crowd-pleaser in any sense of the word. After all, Mountain Goats albums
sound like most band's demos, superficially speaking-- the lion's share of
the project's corpus is John Darnielle singing and strumming an acoustic
guitar into a boombox.
One can't claim stylistic innovation for the group, exactly, because whatever
innovation has occurred over the course of their many records has been purely
internal. The introduction of a violin, an electric guitar, a Casio keyboard
or, hell, a studio is an occasional treat for a listener, but the Goats are
hardly going to be called reinventors of rock music or synthesizers of a bold
new style. The question presented by any record of this ilk is, of course, do
we need more of this stuff? With formally adventurous rock music pushed
progressively to the fringes of culture, do we need more records on which
people further explore territory that's already been mapped to perfection?
But, then, does innovation really matter in the end? What Darnielle and his
merry band are doing, with more acuity and aplomb than virtually anyone in
that great fog of "independent music," is preserving a specific kind of craft
and clear-headed thinking that, in these days of Grooveboxes and 20-minute
remixes, is going the way of the dinosaur.
These kinds of portentous statements might irk someone with a casual awareness
of the Goats' oeuvre, partially because Darnielle stubbornly refuses to hand
over the goods on a casual listening. A lot of the band's songs sound, at
first, like a frantically battered acoustic guitar accompanied by vocals which
don't come near anyone's definition of sonorous or pretty, however passionate
their delivery. Craft and aplomb don't seem to enter the equation.
That ain't Darnielle's fault, though. The years of lo-fi supremacy have
forever paired home recording and acoustic musicianship with the most unctuous
kinds of sincerity and confessionalism. Consequently, Darnielle's writing,
loaded with narrative trapdoors and non-explicit references to other works,
is grouped in with every piece of my-girl-done-wrong twaddle any college
student with a Tascam might decide to dress up with a drum machine and a
made-up record label. But to view the Mountain Goats as a contemporary Cat
Stevens project with a higher tolerance for speaker damage is to miss the
pleasure.
On The Coroner's Gambit, our fearless guide shows off some of his
sharpest writing yet. There are both cutting lines ("I'm just grateful my
children aren't here to see this/ If you'd ever seen fit to give me children")
and masterful set pieces (the rending "Elijah") which exhibit Darnielle's
storytelling ability. But those descriptions imply that The Coroner's
Gambit is pleasant singer/songwriter craft-- all spare arrangements and
lilting whimsy. On the contrary: "spare" is hardly the word for this stuff.
These songs are filled to bursting with feeling, with words, with characters,
with purpose. It often seems like there's nothing going on at all on a
Mountain Goats track. But careful listening to rhythmic flourishes, throwaway
choruses, and the inflections of single words reveals that there's more
happening here than anyone could possibly ask for.
Put the emphasis on "story," of course. Though Darnielle's readings sound
anguished and intimate enough at times to suggest that this is a bad-breakup
record without parallel, he never suggests that these are real-life nuggets
of wisdom. Instead, The Coroner's Gambit is a deeply heartfelt record
about, among other things, the impermanence of life and relationships that
draws from actual feeling but recontextualizes those feelings in carefully
wrought ballads and story songs.
Even better, the musical accompaniment on Gambit is Darnielle's best
yet. Where records like Nine Black Poppies got along on guitar bashing
and enthusiasm, the new offering uses an almost astonishingly subtle approach.
"Island Garden Song" floats over a surprisingly intricate guitar filigree, and
the violin that weaves in and out of "Onions" is cleverly integrated enough to
put to rest any Goats-directed accusations of primitivism.
Of course, any rabidly enthusiastic review for a record of this nature-- one
that executes its given project carefully and movingly, and shows little
interest in smashing boundaries-- begs a question: why do we need more of
this? Why do we need more well-executed folk-pop songs about the travails of
the heart? For those of us out here in the weird-rock hinterlands, sandwiched
as we are between cloying, cute obviousness and foggy abstraction, the answer
to that question is simple: we need this more now than ever.
-Sam Eccleston