The Mountain Goats - Days Review
Another year, another Mountain Goats album. Confronting mortality by lending his pen towards a characteristically broad swathe of subjects – ranging from Guinea Pig 2 to grunge – Days proves John Darnielle is only sharpened by age.
“Do you know how short the days are?” Mountain Goats frontman John Darnielle asks on the title track of their 27th and newest album. Closing in on 60 and with a 34-year-and-counting musical career under his arm, time is clearly at the forefront of his mind. Granted, legacy has always smouldered at the edges of much of his prior writing, burnishing the idiosyncratic foci of the band’s conceptual works with a unique pathos.
Whether it’s transforming the tribulations of less-than-bit-parts in Scarface into an anthem (Transcendental Youth’s ‘The Diaz Brothers’) or romantically regaling the last days of an obscure professional wrestler (see ‘The Ballad of Bull Ramos’ from Beat the Champ), Darnielle has always excelled in humanising his casts beyond simple caricature. They manage to reach relative autonomy through the fleshing out of their life cycles independent of their source material: snapshots of real life blur with his latest musical, sporting or filmic obsessions, all treated with the same reverence.
But even by these standards, Days is a pretty death-centric affair. Nearly every track has some allusion to the curtailing of life, and those that don’t instead revolve around an alternative kind of loss – the disintegration of memory, both personal and collective. In the hands of any other writer, this would doubtless be an unrelentingly morbid affair.
Thankfully, as we know, Darnielle is defter than to approach these subjects from the depressive viewpoint they are generally afforded. He lightens some of the baggage hereditary with the notion of finality by carrying them atop a troupe of esoteric references, meeting someplace in the middle by finding eccentricity in their melancholy and vice versa. This is what allows the hiraeth described in ‘Best Hard Rock Album 2013’ to refract through a music publication’s list from a year gone by or the usage of the ‘Hidden Majesty of Later Venom Albums’ as a stand-in for aging fanbases.
Aptly, then, Days’ meditations sprung from a quirky idea Darnielle dreamt up one day: Grunges, a sequel to their 2017 exploration of ‘80s subcultures Goths set in the ensuing slacker-rock decade. Shrapnel from this embryonic concept is embedded in the final project, though the sense of innocence lost during the ‘90s and our growing distance from it forms its broader panoramic scope.
When people from that decade’s zeitgeist like Layne Staley or Charlie Sheen appear, they’re depicted in the first person: we’re privy to little snapshots of their lives we alight upon and then leave without the time-traveller ache to avert catastrophe. It’s a restraint that comes with aging, as Darnielle explains in a gorgeous press release for the album: “the past is a place upon which you both can & can't enact a sort of renovation: can, by changing perspectives; can't, because you can't actually move any parts around or change anything.”
Sage as this understanding may be, the lack of intervention is by-and-large a conduit for some hilarious vignettes. Take ‘Candlebox’, which depicts an up-and-coming band’s ecstasy over supporting the eponymous group, infamously one of the most hated grunge bands of the era who were roundly dismissed as the death knell of the genre. Or see ‘Woodstock’, set at the trainwreck 1999 revival of the free-love festival that devolved into utter chaos, narrated in the moment by a singer who sees it as a quasi-religious event.
Lead single ‘Charlie Sheen Reaches Out to the Feds’ possesses a similar saviour complex, recounting the actor’s crusade against the horror film Guinea Pig 2 which he believed was a bonafide snuff production. “I will rise to this occasion,” spirals its mantra, blithely unaware of its maturing ridiculousness as his misplaced nobility scales the heights of the secret service. Sequenced directly before it, ‘Song For Layne Staley’ is its inverse, vocalising the late Alice in Chains singer’s diametrically ruptured perception of fame: “I don’t want this, I don’t need this”. Bolstered by guitarist Matt Douglas’ distorted coda, it’s the purest distillation of the intended Grunges concept, complete with a nod to the iconic ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ drum intro.
Somewhat frustratingly, the album doesn’t dare to get as heavy as this opening salvo again. In spite of the Grim Reaper’s shadow lingering across it, Days’ music is deceptively chipper, content to rage against the dying light in a gentler fashion. Pleasingly, there are still surprises nestled in these offerings. Buoyed by saxophone and snowflakes of synth, ‘Annie Haslam Imperial Phase’ is a delightful foray into new wave sleekness that serenades the work ethic of grassroots bands. Meanwhile, the bumptious clip-clop of ‘Crying on Eddie Nash’s Grave’ and ‘Going to Fennario’ whets the appetite for a full-length Mountain Goats country album, especially the latter’s weightless harp solo spun by Mikaela Davis.
However, it’s ultimately the title track and ‘Last Day’ that constitute the beating heart of the album, serving up two diverging views of life’s end that ground the surrounding narrative exercises. The former’s plaintive motorik groove, propelled by drummer Jon Wurster, takes the more bittersweet avenue by honing in on how precious our hours of happiness are. ‘Last Day’ is far more hopeful, riding a trail of blue-eyed soul organ as it closes the album with one final nugget of Darnielle’s astute advice: “keep a good thought in your mind, they won’t leave anybody behind.”