john darnielle

484. The Grey King and the Silver Flame Attunement

Alex Russell Goths , , , , , , ,

“The Grey King and the Silver Flame Attunement” is a big title for a little moment, but one worth considering.

Track: “The Grey King and the Silver Flame Attunement”
Album: Goths (2017)

“The Grey King and the Silver Flame Attunement” barely digs into the fantasy element beyond the title. It doesn’t really need to, because it’s really just an indelible image that John Darnielle saw once: a guy, with fangs, who was clearly more about this life than he was. Who among us hasn’t had a similar experience?

I remember seeing guys at basement shows when I was younger that constantly reminded me that I was never going to be the coolest guy in any room. The thing about these experiences is that they don’t require you to believe that for them to matter. It’s not really about you puffing up your chest and getting knocked down. It’s more about the unstoppable power of someone who knows no one can knock them down. I knew someone once who would ash a cigarette on anything. They were into drag racing. As Darnielle says, nearly in full whisper by the end, “I’m pretty hardcore, but I’m not that hardcore.”

The horns fill this one out and there’s a lot to love around the edges, but my favorite bit is the untold story behind the lyrics “…and good friends // most of them good // most of them friendly.” You may not be The Grey King himself, but your crew is worthy of note then they require a disclaimer for both “good” and “friends.”

483. Andrew Eldritch Is Moving Back to Leeds

Alex Russell Goths , , , , , , ,

“Andrew Eldritch Is Moving Back to Leeds” is what it sounds like, but it’s really about what’s next for all of us.

Track: “Andrew Eldritch Is Moving Back to Leeds”
Album: Goths (2017)

When I first heard “Andrew Eldritch Is Moving Back to Leeds,” I assumed it was a fake name and a character. The urge to pretend here is strong, but I don’t know a single thing about this world. I’m sure Goths hits differently for people who are fans of this style of music, but you do not need to know a single damn thing for this to work. Andrew Eldritch was in The Sisters of Mercy, a band that curiously seems to be rather insistent that they are not goth. I absolutely am not the right person to pull on this thread, but it’s a curious note for a title character on Goths.

Whether you know anything about this world or not, “Andrew Eldritch Is Moving Back to Leeds” is a towering lyrical achievement and probably the best song on Goths. John Darnielle sings seven full verses (depending on how you break it up and what you consider part of the chorus, but this is not really the point) all full of detail. We get a full picture not so much of Eldritch, but of the act of coming back home and accepting a change in life. I feel this is one of Darnielle’s absolute best works, especially the verses about kids leaving for the big city and finding that “everybody tests the membrane // but no one pushes through.”

482. Rain in Soho

Alex Russell Goths , , , , , , ,

“Rain in Soho” introduces Goths with a bang, but also an insistence that it will not explain itself.

Track: “Rain in Soho”
Album: Goths (2017)

The idea of “eras” of Mountain Goats music is a simplistic one that I’ve talked about before here, but it’s one I find hard to resist. Beat the Champ leans somewhat into bigger, grander musicality, but not in the way Goths does. That suggests to me a shift that maybe the band doesn’t feel. Kyle Barbour, the legendary archivist who ran The Annotated Mountain Goats, said that the band “moved on stylistically and thematically” in 2017. I have to agree.

When I first heard Goths I had no idea what to do with it. I liked it, especially “Shelved,” but I found most of the subject matter so alien that I couldn’t even tell that some of the references were references. It’s been almost five years now and I find it only marginally more approachable. The first song, “Rain in Soho,” is a great example of why.

The chorus references “the Batcave,” which is a club from Soho that was the origin point for the subculture that runs through the album. A young John Darnielle was fascinated by it, but most people who hear this song will have never heard of it. That never mattered before and certainly does not on Goths, but on this song it feels like almost the point. This is a place for the lonely who have no other place. If you’re not in the know, that feels like a you problem.

481. Genesis 30:3

Alex Russell The Life of the World to Come , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“Genesis 30:3” takes a pragmatic scene and finds the beauty in it.

Track: “Genesis 30:3”
Album: The Life of the World to Come (2009)

Obviously they are very different, but “Genesis 30:3” always calls to mind “Pink and Blue” for me. That song is about child abandonment and the pain of a parent who we never hear from. Maybe their circumstances are grim and maybe there’s more going on, but we are presented a story and asked to hear it before we think about what got us to that moment. “Genesis 30:3” does that, too.

The verse Genesis 30:3 is about Blihah, a slave that Rachel ordered to sleep with Jacob to produce children when Rachel could not. John Darnielle told a lengthy story in Amsterdam you should read all of to consider the politics of this moment, but the point here is the story itself. Just like in “Pink and Blue,” there is something else happening, but the birth itself is beautiful when considered from Rachel’s perspective. She cannot do what she must do, so she must do something else. We hear her resigned, but also ready for the good moments she can draw from this.

When The Life of the World to Come came out in 2009, some fans wrote it off on basis of the source material. If you’re in that camp, “Genesis 30:3” is probably the toughest one to swallow. I find it beautiful, especially given the difficulty of framing a story like this as a moment of beauty. It’s easy to take the surface level grim realities of the day and move on, but sit with the lingering piano and the images, especially if you generally don’t do that.

480. Matthew 11:14-19

Alex Russell the life of the world in flux , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“Matthew 11:14-19” compares the reluctance of a crowd to believe in a savior with a more direct foe.

Track: “Matthew 11:14-19”
Album: The Life of the World in Flux (2009)

There are, as far as I know, only two versions of “Matthew 11:14-19.” There’s the one on The Life of the World in Flux and there’s this live version that John Darnielle opened a solo performance with in New York a few months ago as of this writing. The live version is nearly identical, with the only change being the number of degrees the character turns around. It’s the opening song for that live show, which Darnielle has said before he reserves for songs the audience doesn’t know or hasn’t heard often. It’s a fitting spot for it. He describes it at that show as a song that “maybe two people have ever heard” and says that he picked it specifically as a shocking choice for a solo show, which he does because from his early days performing solo he learned that people usually don’t listen to the first one unless you blow them away.

The verses in the title describe a generation that does not believe that Jesus was the chosen one and they do not believe his messengers. “It takes a crowd to drown a witch,” the song tells us, and the verses similarly show crowds that combine to form a full generation of nonbelievers.

The rest is a little more esoteric. The Claude Rains mention and the bandages are references to The Invisible Man, but the bleeding eyes are something else. Rains played a literally invisible man in that movie, but here we have more of a standard Darnielle character as a monster that’s a stand-in for general opposition.

479. Enoch 18:14

Alex Russell the life of the world in flux, The Life of the World to Come , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

There are two source materials for “Enoch 18:14,” but it seems to be more about getting lost in general than either one.

Track: “Enoch 18:14”
Album: The Life of the World to Come (2009) and The Life of the World in Flux (2009)

The Book of Enoch is not part of the biblical canon, though it is supposedly written by Enoch, a man who possibly entered heaven alive and certainly, in the text of the Book of Genesis, lived among other characters you might know. We lack the space and I lack the expertise to get into the story of the Apocrypha, but it is unsurprising and fantastic that John Darnielle included what he calls “a bonus track” from the Bible on this album.

The Book of Enoch is apocalyptic, but it’s specifically about the possibility of evil “watcher” angels. The text of the song “Enoch 18:14” also borrows direct text from the video game Odin Sphere, a role-playing game published by Atlus, and Darnielle has told the story about using these lines at a few live shows. I watched him explain this in person once, in great detail, but even there it felt more important that it was important to him than the source material’s actual importance. It feels a little like the Ozzy songs, in that way, where you don’t need to know anything about Odin Sphere, or Enoch, really, you just need to know that it matters to the band. The comparison between this part of Odin Sphere and Enoch is all about the depth of emotion and the desire to embrace darkness. The song comes from there, but it also comes from the ability to get so deeply lost in other worlds when running from that same desire.

478. Deuteronomy 2:10

Alex Russell the life of the world in flux, The Life of the World to Come , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

We hear from three narrators who are gone in “Deuteronomy 2:10,” but we are reminded there are more.

Track: “Deuteronomy 2:10”
Album: The Life of the World to Come (2009) and The Life of the World in Flux (2009)

When confronting all of the songs on The Life of the World to Come, I try to remember how they sounded in 2009. “Deuteronomy 2:10” is a crushing, impossible song now. I suppose it was then, too, but I don’t remember it hitting me as hard at the time. There are other songs on the album that are more directly about human loss, pain, and memory, and I think it’s only natural that those feel more immediate and more memorable to us.

“Deuteronomy 2:10” is the story of three animals who are now extinct. It’s sung from their perspective, as we hear the last tiger of its kind accept that it will die in captivity, a flightless bird smell the burning of timber that signals the end of a forest, and a toad ribbit by itself in moonlight. Extinction as a concept is huge to confront, almost impossibly big to imagine. There are so many songs about death and loss that it is surprising, somewhat, to find a deeper kind of end that asks even more of you, emotionally.

The verse in Deuteronomy is a simple one, a brief reference to a people, the Emites, who no longer live in a place. It is about a kind of extinction, but the final part of the verse says the Emites were “as tall as the Anakites.” The Anakites were supposedly giants and were the ancestors to Goliath, who David slew. What’s interesting is that even a verse about an extinct people briefly references yet another group that’s gone, reminding us of the multitudes more beyond these three narrators.

477. Matthew 25:21

Alex Russell the life of the world in flux, The Life of the World to Come , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The verse offers hope where the lyrics do not in “Matthew 25:21.”

Track: “Matthew 25:21”
Album: The Life of the World to Come (2009) and The Life of the World in Flux (2009)

Early in his career, John Darnielle wrote few songs about himself. That didn’t stop people from assuming he was the narrator in every song, but most of those characters were fictional. The narrator in “Matthew 25:21” is John Darnielle, visiting his mother-in-law as she deals, directly in the third verse, with treatment for cancer. Darnielle has said that he had to cancel a show to make the trip he describes in the lyrics and the song came out of the feelings that followed the events as described. It is literal, but it does not suffer for being so. I still find it difficult to listen to, even after hearing it likely hundreds of times.

The title comes from a verse, as does every song on this album, which describes a servant left with a sum of money over a long period of time. The servant doubles the money and is rewarded for diligence, which we can extrapolate into a statement about faith and works. This is contrasted with another servant who does not work and thus does not further their master’s goals. There are a few lessons here, but the one I take is that it is better to work than to be idle, but also that this work will be rewarded. The song is a crushing tale of loss told during and after the events, but the title holds a hope that something that comes next will mitigate how you feel right now. It’s a nice thought, for the servant, but the song reminds us to keep that in mind as we find no respite for ourselves.

476. Romans 10:9

Alex Russell the life of the world in flux, The Life of the World to Come , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The contrasts of the verses and the chorus are important in “Romans 10:9.”

Track: “Romans 10:9”
Album: The Life of the World to Come (2009) and The Life of the World in Flux (2009)

It’s not unique to the Mountain Goats, but people seem to take the opposite intention from songs sometimes. It’s one thing not to “get” a song, I think just about all of them are open to some form of interpretation and it’s not fair to tell anyone they are “wrong” about any song. That said, Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” is not the full-on patriotic tune everyone misunderstands it as and people do the same thing with Mountain Goats songs.

One such song is “Romans 10:9,” with a prayer for a chorus, bright vocals, and a a jaunty tune. Darnielle’s mentioned this directly before and it’s somewhat expected given it’s on The Life of the World to Come. But just like every song on Beat the Champ is about wrestling and also something else, the same thing applies here. You’ll get something out of it as a song about faith, but it’s also about the limitations of faith.

The narrator says they can’t sleep. They say they are terrified to truly take in their surroundings. They say they’ll go to the pharmacy, but they won’t take the drugs. I love the phrasing of that part, “won’t take the medication, but it’s good to have around” and it pairs nicely with the hopeful, but not certain, prayer of “a kind and loving God won’t let my small ship run aground.” Faith might aid you, but you have to do some of this work yourself.

475. Psalms 40:2

Alex Russell the life of the world in flux, The Life of the World to Come , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The characters in “Psalms 40:2” may be low right now, but they know that’s where you start your climb.

Track: “Psalms 40:2”
Album: The Life of the World to Come (2009) and The Life of the World in Flux (2009)

“Psalms 40:2” builds as it goes. John Darnielle’s voice vibrates over the very first line and he bares his teeth over even simple turns of phrase like “checked into a Red Roof Inn.” He almost speaks, more than sings, some of the lines in the opening verses, but you can feel the tension through words like “shrapnel.” It escalates so slightly, line by line, until the explosion at the end with the exultation that “he has raised me from the pit and he will set me high.”

The delivery, and the drums, especially, tell you this is getting worse and worse. It’s directly about some people, young people, who are driving around and destroying things. They feel bad, but not too bad, and that’s something most of us can relate to at that point in our lives. Darnielle has said before it’s about a specific chapel in Missouri. I haven’t been there and you probably haven’t either, but you’ve been to the one in your mind. When you’re young you feel extreme. You feel like everything matters, and it kinda does.

The verse is about that ending line, but there’s a lot going on there. Darnielle once gave an interview where he mentioned that this one is about an idea of closeness to God through opposition. It is when you are at your lowest — when you’re in that pit — that you can be raised the highest. It doesn’t feel that way in the moment, but it’s a nice thing to keep in mind if you can.