THE MOUNTAIN GOATS
Heretic Pride
(4AD)
*** 1/2 (out of five)
When I say that John Darnielle is the best lyricist working in rock music today, I know that’s an entirely personal assessment. Something about the discipline of his song structures, the way his verses proceed inexorably toward their final rhyming syllables, the specificity with which he evokes settings and characters (the way, in the title song on The Mountain Goats’ new disc Heretic Pride, he takes the time to note “the honeysuckle on the faint breeze” even as a mob is tearing his body to pieces), his ability to retain a certain wry, clinical detachment even in the midst of some fairly extreme emotional states... it all works for me in a way few other songwriters do.
The Mountain Goats release new material at such a reliable pace—roughly an album every 12 or 13 months—that it doesn’t matter so much to me that Heretic Pride isn’t the emotionally shattering masterpiece that I thought its predecessor, 2006’s Get Lonely, was. Keep giving me half a dozen songs every year like the self-hating screed “Autoclave,” the vivid relationship sketch “How to Embrace a Swamp Creature” or the mysterious “Tianchi Lake,” and I’ll be more than happy.
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