The Mountain Goats
Heretic Pride
4AD/ Remote Control


Now in their 17th year as a group loosely formed around John Darnielle, The Mountain Goats' 16th album sounds... kinda how you'd expect it to, considering the trend set by their last few offerings. 'Heretic Pride' is probably the most skillfully arranged album by the 'Goats, and the group certainly employs the spare instrumentation to the best effect on this one.

Darnielle's style as a songwriter has changed considerably as well - his lyrics have moved away from the lush, literary stylings of his earlier work and he seems to focus more on melody, working with the band to construct tightly knotted little balls of tension, which inevitably erupt, gloriously. The best example of this is the 3-minute buildup of In The Craters On The Moon. The album took me a while to enjoy, although others have said that they liked it right away. The fairly minimal instrumentation means that it can take some listening before all subtleties are revealed, although sad little catchy tunes like Autoclave and the delicate, touching San Bernardino jump out immediately.

How To Embrace A Swamp Creature starts out like a classic Mountain Goats track, but then as elements are added until the chorus peaks, the combination of the backing vocals (provided in part by early Mountain Goat, Rachel Ware) and the triumphant piano line enough to take this somewhere the band has not been before.

Lovecraft In Brooklyn is one of the highlights of the album, and features electric guitar with a bit of overdrive (!) and is the 'Goats at their most harshly unhinged. A bit like See America Right, off 2002's 'Tallahassee', it's harder, and sounds a bit more like the narrator's world's about to end.

Sept 15, 1983 nods (extremely distantly) to Darnielle's reggae appreciation, mainly through use of a beatiful organ drenched in reverb. The song is about gangsters invading a dinner party, and is a pretty good indication of the kind of lyrical content covered on the album. Still obsessed with the hopeless, the irrationally hopeful, the lost and the almost completely unwired, Darnielle writes about serial killers and pulp spy novelists, imaginary cults and slasher movies.

This isn't a return to the boombox era of the 'Goats, and really seems to evidence that the era's gone for good. Either way, the direction taken by the band is still very effective, and as always, maintains a uniqueness about it that is characteristically Darnielle.

Ben Ford-Smith