The Mountain Goats, All Eternals Deck review

First published by the BBC

John Darnielle used to walk onstage with just a guitar and joke, "Hello, we're the Mountain Goats." But with every passing album, Darnielle's poetry songs that he used to sketch roughly and beautifully with just a guitar and voice have turned into pocket symphonies whose sound has expanded with their creator's visions. On his 13th studio album using the band's name (and the band's third as a three-piece), there is hardly a hiss or a bum note as Darnielle strums, yells, sings and preys for his and his characters' salvation in a tapestry of a gothic and occult dramas which require more than just your full attention, but a lyric sheet as well.

The narratives of the songs aren't as daunting as the previous album, The Life of the World to Come, where every song was named after and loosely based on passages from the Bible. But the days of sitting down with a Mountain Goats album and being able to catch a whole story in two minutes, like on the anthemic ode to misery, No Children, are as far behind Darnielle as his old day-job as a psychiatric nurse in North Carolina. All Eternals Deck, named after a deck of tarot cards, plays like a series of short films which come with no explanation or conclusion. Characters arrive on the scene, freak out, remember old loves, get lost in dreams, and then leave the stage like in one of Robert Lowell's poems.

The instrumentation is surprisingly excessive, with strings, drums and a piano adding atmosphere to songs which rely more heavily on the musical accompaniment to tell the story than on any of the previous work. It's telling that the centrepiece of the album, though, High Hawk Season, is a scary gospel strum with just a guitar, bass and beautifully off-kilter male harmonies, with a chorus that mystifies us like so: "Rise if you are sleeping, stay awake. We are young supernovas and the heat's about to break." While the other songs, intrelligent pieces of art that they are, may intrigue us, it's disappointing that only one song compels us to really feel anything.