The Mountain Goats | Satanic Messiah EP

FRESH BAKED
The Mountain Goats
Satanic Messiah EP
2008 | Cadmean Dawn
A-

It seems an unnecessary exercise at this point, to attempt to convert any of John Darnielle’s disbelievers. He’s really only one of two things: either the best young songwriter of the past decades, or a cloying and over-hyped nasal howl, keening along in the general din. His adorers are fearless and devoted, while those unengaged or disinclined are viciously stubborn and unforgiving. So, while I could attempt proselytizing, while I could quote “Going to Georgia” or “Broom People” or “Quito” or that perennial crowd favorite, “No Children,” it seems safer to assume that The Mountain Goats’ output is polarizing in the truest sense and that no conversion is possible. You either hold Darnielle’s songs in your heart as living beasts, or you dismiss him as just another songwriter. He is either one of the true great living authors, or simply another dude with a guitar.

So, I’ll assume that if you’re reading, still, then you want to read about The Mountain Goats, that you track their progress as ardently as a God-fearing congregant, that the release of a four-song EP, like Satanic Messiah, is of utmost critical interest. Because that’s what Darnielle inspires: disinterest or (perhaps) overzealous enthusiasm.

An EP from The Mountain Goats is a curious thing, if only because the best of Darnielle’s canon is so inextricably linked to context. The Sunset Tree, All Hail West Texas, Talahassee, Get Lonely – these are all records irremovable from their contextual content (a bildungsroman; a Valentine to, well, West Texas; two of the greatest “break-up albums” ever conceived). And, stretching a listeners scope backwards, widewards, to the entirety of Darnielle’s canon, it becomes clear that the entirety of his output is conceptual: there is connective tissue threading throughout all of his work, tying together songs that, chronologically, seem to have no relationship to one another. In this regard, Satanic Messiah is a strange beast. It is as close to political as Darnielle has ever come, even though, in a sense, it’s completely apolitical: wherever we might assume a character a political figurehead, he might just as well be a long-haired heavy metal singer. If anything, this is an album – as many of The Mountain Goats’ albums are – about devotion, near-obsession, and human longing. If there is any true conceptual lyrical thread, it is obscure: perhaps political, maybe sociological, certainly poignant, and largely enshadowed.

Which actually illuminates the greatest similarity between Satanic Messiah and its predecessor, Heretic Pride. Heretic Pride, The Mountain Goats’ last proper full-length, was, at the very least, frustrating: it contains a few tremendous songs (“Autoclave” is a personal favorite), but no distinct or living purpose. It’s just an “album,” a collection of songs. Sure, you can trace the monstrous imagery throughout, or the Lovecraftian influence – but these are trifling threads. Generally speaking, Heretic Pride was a step-back for Darnielle, if only insofar as it fails to attain an instantaneously canonical status. It’s only a compilation of great songs; it’s not a great album.

Satanic Messiah contains four songs. Two of which (“Satanic Messiah” and “Gojam Province 1968”) feature Darnielle, accompanied almost exclusively by piano. And these two songs are better than the other two songs, for lack of some better phrasing. They illuminate Darnielle’s growth as a performer: whereas, once, his appeal was rooted exclusively in his bloodthirsty, anxious yelp, his fevered, impassioned howling, Darnielle has now slowed. On Satanic Messiah his voice recalls the silent longing of Get Lonely. It’s a reserved and confident and straight-out ballsy songwriter who can strip his material of so much ingrained energy and present it, as in aspic, a sterile and simple document: a voice, restrained, and a piano. But Darnielle pulls it off here – which is perhaps why Satanic Messiah is essential listening for any Mountain Goats fan. There’s a lot to be said for why “Song For Dennis Brown” or “Love, Love, Love” might have hurt the general tone of The Sunset Tree, or why it’s so disappointing to listen to “Cotton” after We Shall All Be Healed’s devastating, revelatory, flawless “Quito.” These were “quiet songs” on albums wherein the frenzied energy of the upbeat songs was crucial, central. The quietude of these songs, in context, disabled any poignancy they would have otherwise possessed.

On Messiah, it is the quiet that is important. Darnielle is singing, as usual, about the disenfranchised, the desperate, the disillusioned. But this is the first time that his voice so brilliantly conveys no vitriol, no fervent, no anger. It’s the voice of a singer crippled with regret, sure, but it’s a knowing regret; it’s calm and quiet and it seems to understand the lunacy of its anger, the juvenile flaws of its judgment.

They’re not perfect songs. “Wizard Buys a Hat,” although it contains the incredible delivery of “This is the church/This is the crucible,” is sort of lifeless, and “Sarcofago Live” is borderline uninspired. But, as with the entirety of Darnielle’s collected works, there are moments of inarguable brilliance. When he sings on “Gojam Province 1968” of a bloodlusting Ethiopian mob, “Then all at once here comes the motorcade/Slow and steady down the beaten track/And as we’re basking out the windows of the limo/We notice there’s nobody in the back,” I can’t help but maintain that Darnielle understands and articulates the complexities of human zeal, thirst, joy, and disappointment better than anyone else in the game.

Yes, this is an EP consisting of four songs that are, honestly speaking, not of the jaw-dropping, revelatory quality of his best work. But the point remains: there are few songwriters around today who are producing a body of work so exhaustive, so productive, so giving and knowledgeable, as John Darnielle. And that a four song EP can seem so essential, in light of it seeming so secondary in context of his canon, is astonishing. It is this basic capacity, this ability to make songs seem so necessary, to make them seem so definitive and important and urgent, that Darnielle so consistently and effortlessly illustrates. What an asshole.

by Chris Kiehne

www.mountain-goats.com

Get a free download of the Satanic Messiah EP here: http://satanicmessiah.com/