mountain goats by marie

A Week With The Mountain Goats' "Heretic Pride": Day 2

21 February 2008
tell your friends... tell your friends...

Words by Walt Carlson // Illustration by Marie Tribouilloy

When I woke up this morning, it was unseasonably warm and the sun was unseasonably bright. It was disorienting, and I felt a little lightheaded as my room pulled itself together from whatever was left of my dreams like a teacup gathering back from its shards: whole but ominous.

I’ve been thinking a lot about death. I blame Heretic Pride.
It’s an album not explicitly about death, but about its inevitability, its looming, the undeniable weight of it in the back of your head, of his head, of all the heads of John Darnielle’s characters as they go about their business of living and loving and not loving and dying in all its shapes. It’s an album haunted by the ghosts of lost loves and bad decisions made manifest in places you wouldn’t expect them; sometimes as apparent as the electric guitar on “Lovecraft in Brooklyn” and other times subtly tucked into Darnielle’s deft lines but always there and always ready to make themselves known.

Which is why it’s only natural for the titular heretic of “Heretic Pride” to laugh like a child in the face of death, his senses open wide to the whole of the world as the flames envelope him. He isn’t afraid. It’s a beautiful day, all breezes and honeysuckle, and he knows that the faces in the crowd around the pyre will never know what he knows about life in the euphoric instant of transfiguration.
And the characters writhing about Heretic Pride know the thick line between transfiguration and redemption; how reassembly doesn’t fix much of anything; how waiting and feeling desperation grow can be more cleansing than a wire sponge. You’re only going to know someone after they crack and it’s not going to be pretty, they tell you, but it’s got to be done. You can leave if you want to, you can close your eyes if you want to, but you’re going to want to find some measure of solace before this is over by your hands or by mine.

Most of all, it’s the inevitability of a black and nameless end — death, maybe — that binds the album together like the clenched hands of Darnielle’s infamous Alpha couple (memorialized in Tallahassee and absent here) as they marched, lockstep, down to the end, their own end, together.

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