I confess to being totally baffled by the Mountain Goats. First off, the band is officially comprised of several people, though the vast majority of their recordings feature only one person: John Darnielle of Southern California. The others crop up as occasional backup singers or additional instrumentalists, but very rarely; more often than not these songs are just John playing guitar and singing alone in his living room. Darnielle has revealed in interviews that he becomes very frustrated when hearing his recordings described as "just one guy playing guitar and singing alone in his living room" because he values the invisible input of the other Mountain Goats. He's complex like that.
Secondly, the Mountain Goats record their songs on a boombox, on plain old cassettes. I've heard more professional sounding recordings come out of answering machines. I mean, several of their songs end with the clearly audible click of the stop button being pressed on that boombox. There's no multitracking, there's horrible distortion and background noise, there are dropouts from damaged tape. And it's been like that for ten years.
Third, given an uninterrupted hour in a quiet room, I myself could teach most people, including my 11- year- old cousin, to play the guitar with the same proficiency as Darnielle. But when John makes a mistake or plays a sour note (which is often) he doesn't yell "do overs" and stop the tape. He finishes the song and puts it on a CD. Sure, he's gotten better over the years, but he still makes mistakes. The striking thing is that he appears to take great pride in them.
Fourth, and this is really all you need to know about the Mountain Goats, John Darnielle has the singular ability to sing lines that nobody should be able to sing straight- faced and make them sound simultaneously absurd, melancholy, and absolutely beautiful. Lines like, "It's gonna be so nice when the Easter Bunny comes," or, "There's a monkey in the basement/ Where did the monkey come from?"
Darnielle creates miniature narratives much like those of Jorge Luis Borges: small spaces with their own rules, drawing inspiration largely from classical sources. Protein Source of the Future... Now!, a collection of 7", cassette and compilation releases, is chock full of these weird little lines and spaces. The veiled menace of "Night of the Mules," the magical realism- cum- western of "Billy the Kid's Dream of the Magic Shoes," the one finger Casiotone accompaniment on "Going to Malibu,"-- this album is rotten with lyrics and music that nobody should be able to get away with. But somehow, when Darnielle sings, "I am evil forest/ That would kill a man on the day his life seems sweetest to him," you believe him. And when he plays the same chord for a full twenty seconds at the end of "Going to Tennessee," you're bummed when he stops. Because he plays that one chord like he means it, godammit, and that's more than you can say about nearly everybody else out there. Rock on, John. Yeeah!!
