In enjoying morbid art, it is necessary that danger feel present. “When I receive the blessing I’ve got coming,” Darnielle crows in 2004’s “ Quito,” “I’m going to raise an ice-cold glass of water/ and toast the living and the dead/ who’ve gone before me, and my head/ will throb like an old wound reopening.” Images of black ritual, fantasy, and escape stake an outline around unspeakable realities. But Mountain Goats songs are as much incantation as narrative-they imply the advent of the trauma with declarations and appeals to dead gods, which deny it or try (futilely) to ward it off. When critics and journalists discuss Darnielle’s new, first full-length novel, Wolf in White Van, which was just nominated for a National Book Award, they often point out the storytelling aspect of his songwriting.
That is what Mountain Goats songs are mainly about, whether tender or noisy or ridiculous. When your house catches fire, it does not matter how many buildings have burned before. Loss is a human constant, but for each person it occurs each time as if it were the first. So, even if they are, like all the new and old thinking, about loss, it is most often in the mode of trauma-of the sudden blow that renders the lost object or the lost self unreachable, and fixes attention on the shape of its absence. Many of his songs are short and fast-paced, but most of all they tend to focus on the flash of a moment when something changes or a revelation falls into place they shine a spotlight on that ineffable sensation and then short out before it has a chance to fade.
“In this it resembles all the old thinking.” Most art by its nature has an elegiac element, in the way it mimics memory, and in its awareness that to try to represent the world is inevitably to miss some of it too, to feel truth slipping out of grasp, running between the fingers and evaporating.Īs the prolific songwriter who performs (whether solo or with partners) as the Mountain Goats, John Darnielle battles back against that slippage with a host of strategies I might categorize as surprise attacks.
“All the new thinking is about loss,” Robert Hass wrote in his classic 1979 poem Meditation at Lagunitas.
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