mountain goats by marie

A Week With The Mountain Goats' "Heretic Pride": Day 4

29 February 2008
tell your friends... tell your friends...

Words by Walt Carlson // Illustration by Marie Tribouilloy

I’ve made no small case for the monsters in Heretic Pride. And they shouldn’t be ignored. However, they are not huge colossi, lumbering across the album’s landscape; often they come into view only on repeated listens, like shapes in the night as your eyes adjust to the darkness.

There are more than monsters to be found here, just as there is more to a relationship’s implosion than heartbreak and anger.
There’s the way in which Heretic Pride is like Get Lonely or The Sunset Tree or any of the later Mountain Goats albums. There’s the way in which it’s more like the early stuff, back when John Darnielle still relied on a Panasonic RX-FT500 boom box he got from JC Penny. There’s the way Heretic Pride is completely separate from everything that has come before it.

It’s like later albums for the reasons I’ve already mentioned: The higher production values, key non-Darniellian instruments, Peter Hughes. It’s an extension of everything since Tallahassee, building upon the same production ideals (and refusing to allow an increase in tracks and technology mean a decrease in what The Mountain Goats have consistently been about); reconsidering or delving deeper into some of the same themes and adding complementary ones.

It’s also like earlier albums because, although the hiss of tape is gone, the same intensity shakes Darnielle’s voice and guides it along the many stories he tells over the course of the album. The Bright Mountain Choir is back.

Heretic Pride is separate from other entries in The Mountain Goats discography because its moments of optimism come few and far between. There are no answers here. The sun is as hot as hell; the earth is cracked and barren. Love is an evil and destructive thing; its end inevitable, the pull inescapable.

The characters’ inner selves are often as lost as their physical selves, as hurt and as desperate.

Let us look toward “Tianchi Lake,” toward the shimmering surface of the water as it breaks to allow the Monster to surface. All the people there are quiet and still, the Monster is floating lazily, unconcerned by its spectators. Somewhere nearby children draw pictures of things stranger than the creature in the lake; their own imagined monsters sprawl across paper, their hands hot, the day hotter.

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