Lonesomes of Leeds unite! Mountain Goats are in town! And they’ve got a song about Leeds! From the point of view of a crestfallen Gothic hero! No, the 80’s kind!
Here, things going wrong (on stage! and in the past!) are met with kindly laughter and applause! You are among friends here, intelligent social misfit!
A huge full ‘Harvest’ Moon, hot air balloons over Hyde Park, where Andrew Eldricht once lived and raised The Sisters Of Mercy from a student Sepulchre in the early 80s. The queue is out the car park, and ticket touts patrol. A cult band write a song about a city’s almost forgotten cultural export and the city responds by selling out the shows across two nights. This is the first. He declares The Brudenell his favourite room to play in, and the crowd roar as the feeling is mutual: we are being treated ourselves, by the presence of one of the Great American Writers of his generation….. John Darnielle: David Sedaris with a guitar. Darnielle approaches ‘teenage’ subcultures with a novelist’s eye and an insider’s passion: small-time wrestling and now, Goth. Darnielle didn’t choose to make concept albums about these things the way Sufjan Stevens once planned to make an album for every state in the union; these songs feel experienced not just researched.
Even if some songs are research jobs, they are deep research jobs and are that skillfully sketched that they feel they’ve been lived, notebook in hand, but still lived. He loved wrestling, saw it weekly with his stepdad in adolescence and therefore knows the textural minutiae, the living details. On his latest album, he does the same for Goth, born in Leeds and raised by the dungeon denizens of it’s Le Phono Club. The mix desk guys surprise him with dry ice as he sings about the city
‘A few old buildings gone to dust
And some new ones in the way
They’ll look just like the old ones
When the winds have had their say
See the children bound for London
You’ll all be back too
Everybody tests the membrane
But no-one pushes through
Come on boys that’ll be enough
You’d think your old friends wouldn’t play so tough
Like a basket by the Nile, hiding down among the reeds,
Andrew Eldritch , is moving back to Leeds’.
‘ Rain In Soho’ -on record a knowingly OTT -doomy, partly choral, paen to a seminal Goth club -shows musically Darnielle reconnecting with his inner D&D teenager, when Goth was in full dead bloom. It sounds more like ‘Rain In Mordor’: ‘ the river goes where the water flows, no one knows when The Batcave closed’. Here, it’s stripped down to basics: two people, Darnielle and multi-instrumentalist Matt Douglas, parlaying songs such as ‘Shelved’ where he takes his X-ray poetic vision to such subjects as unreleased major label albums circa 1982. He puts his arm around the terminally disappointed among us. He’s been there for me. I’m sure everyone in the crowd has a moment where they fell finally fully in love with The Mountain Goats. Mine was ‘See America Right’ -which, despite me plucking up the courage to call out for, doesn’t get played – but in it you have a précis of Darnielle’s angle of attack: love songs from the point of view of societal outsiders, yes, done before, but this outsider isn’t Springsteen-esque and yearning for betterment through carnal and vehicular salvation, he’s Darnielle-esque and therefore drunk and doing dumb things.
‘Got on the bus half-drunk again, the driver glared at me
Met up with you in Ingles, thumbed a ride to Cedar Key
If we never make it back to California, I want you to know I love you
But my love is like a dark cloud full of rain, always right there up above you’.
You’d never guess it, but John Danielle is a bit of a former badass himself. Listen to his WTF interview with Marc Maron, for a candid and brilliant appendix to the songs. He’s been on some slippery slopes, and he writes from them. Or from, as David Berman, another poet with a guitar, would say: ‘ the view from falling behind’, where a man can collect his thoughts, undistracted by such flimflam as happiness.
His Anti-anthems are anthemic: ‘ No Children’, the BizarroWorld ‘I Will Always Love You’, is met with wild applause before it even reaches its opening couplet of: ‘I hope our few remaining friends give up on trying to save us and I hope we come up with a fail-safe plot to piss off the dumb few that forgave us’.
His banter is as warm and witty and self-deprecating as the songs themselves, there is backstory provided to some, and he sometimes annotates them, telling us, between sung lines, about the lines (‘there I ripped off T.S Eliot’). The kind of invisible wall you are pressing up against with the live experience of, say, Darnielle’s contemporary, Bill Callahan, is further demolished tonight as the overflowing audience goodwill means no awkward moments for forgotten lyrics (to a requested song) but instead phones helpfully passed to the stage (and there’s a joke about the lyrics being on found Genius.com). Songwriter as best friend, audience as support group, even if this support group are all singing ‘Hail Satan!’ with smiles on our faces (for the chorus of ‘The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton’ ). I look around at loners mouthing every lyric, to songs of warm cynicism: observations, nuggets, gems…(think Dan Clowes if he’d chosen wire and wood instead of pen and ink). The minutiae though is a way into emotional archaeology, not so much about the voice and the guitar playing, god bless him. No, it’s the lyrics that appreciate in value with each listen through life. I’m twenty years into DarnielleWorld, and even better words and tunes arrive album by album. He cycles back to immature passions to say mature things and – especially on these ‘concept’ albums – writes about the point at which the child gives way to the adult, or, crucially, doesn’t give way. Masochistically dissecting one emotional good kicking or another for our mutual healing, he revisits physically, he tells us, places ‘where bad things happened’ to him. ‘Places where I’ve had traumatic times, of which they are quite a few, and I go back….’ excavating with pick and guitar, looking, as a forensics team would, for things left behind in the details.
Songwriter as best friend, audience as support group, even if this support group are all singing ‘Hail Satan!’ with smiles on our faces (for the chorus of ‘The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton’ ). I look around at loners mouthing every lyric, to songs of warm cynicism: observations, nuggets, gems…(think Dan Clowes if he’d chosen wire and wood instead of pen and ink). The minutiae though is a way into emotional archaeology, not so much about the voice and the guitar playing, god bless him. No, it’s the lyrics that appreciate in value with each listen through life. I’m twenty years into DarnielleWorld, and even better words and tunes arrive album by album. He cycles back to immature passions to say mature things and – especially on these ‘concept’ albums – writes about the point at which the child gives way to the adult, or, crucially, doesn’t give way. Masochistically dissecting one emotional good kicking or another for our mutual healing, he revisits physically, he tells us, places ‘where bad things happened’ to him. ‘Places where I’ve had traumatic times, of which they are quite a few, and I go back….’ excavating with pick and guitar, looking, as a forensics team would, for things left behind in the details.
As a guy who writes Carveresque songs about such things as the travails of the 80s polytechnic circuit for bands in Goth’s Vauxhall League well knows – it’s all about the little details making up the bigger picture. A worrier-warrior on The Quest Through The Quotidian, snatching victory from The Parking Wardens Of Doom and The Final Reminder Notices Of The Night.