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.
