The Mountain Goats
Heretic Pride
2008

If you download one song, download: "Autoclave."

I'm pretty sure I'd heard of the Mountain Goats a few years before I downloaded this album. Either I read about them in a magazine or I had heard one of their songs on a mix that someone gave me. I'm not sure how, but the name was familiar before I decided to give them a serious try. The thing is, they didn't fit the predisposed auditory image I had set for them. I imagined something bluegrassy, more fitting of the name. The Mountain Goats aren't bluegrassy at all, and that's a good thing.

Heretic Pride is poppy and fun, and just a touch geeky. John Darnielle's vocals sound a lot like They Might Be Giants. In fact, you might say that the Mountain Goats resemble that band quite a bit, only scaled way back. The Mountain Goats sing love songs with smart and clever lyrics. They Might Be Giants perform nerdy songs with lyrics about being a mammal.

The songs themselves are enough to make me like the Mountain Goats (well, most of the songs...I could do without "So Desperate") but after listening to the album a couple of times, I decided to do some research on this band of which I'd kind of but not really heard. The things I learned made me like the album even more. I love how Darnielle recorded most of the early albums on a boombox, cranking them out extremely rapidly because that's how he wrote songs. And if he didn't get his songs recorded right away, he'd forget them as his mind flooded with the new songs he was working on. I love the themes that run throughout the Mountain Goats' songs. For example, there's a whole series of "Going to..." songs: "Going to Jamaica," "Going to Cleveland," "Going to Malibu," "Going to Wisconsin." But the series that intrigues me most is about an alcoholic couple constantly on the verge of divorce -- the Alpha series.

So intrigued was I at the Alpha series that I downloaded a second Mountain Goats album, Tallahassee, a concept album about this fictional couple moving to Florida to drink themselves to death, which is at least as good as Heretic Pride, if not better. My first-impression favorite songs from that album include "No Children" and "Game Shows Touch Our Lives." The whole thing reminds me of the short stories of Raymond Carver.

What it all comes down to in the end is that John Darnielle is not necessarily a great singer. He's not necssarily a great musician. But I would say that he's a great writer. And the fact that he loves what he is doing comes through in the music.