The Mountain Goats – In League With Dragons
Merge Records – 26 April 2019
It’s hard not to be intrigued by album which features among the songs titles a track called Cadaver Sniffing Dog. Apparently written on Christmas Day, 2017, an itchy uptempo rhythm with cheery backing vocals it’s essentially to do with a crime scene investigation serving a metaphor for a relationship in which there is nothing left to salvage, and forms part of the tapestry on The Mountain Goats’ seventeenth studio album which, inspired by tabletop role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons, has been described as a “partial rock opera” with influences from noir literature.
Songwriter and frontman John Darnielle says it began life as a rock opera about a besieged seaside community called Riversend ruled by a benevolent wizard. However, as it developed, under the influence of Sicilian mysteries author Leonardo Sciascia and Ross MacDonald’s The Zebra-Striped Hearse, it took on different shapes, imagining the wizard in a real-world context, tryout pitching for an American League team or watching a casino country show, exploring themes such as “rebellion against irresistible tides, the lush vistas of decay, necessary alliances.”
A complex, sonically multi-textural affair it opens with throbbing bass and steady drumbeat of Done Bleeding, piano joining the instrumentation on the cascading chords of a melodically catchy song Darnielle describes as being about looking back and realising you’ve have moved on from who you once were and that the destructive behaviours you once defined yourself with are no longer a part of you. Younger, with its urgent driving drum pattern and echoey hushed vocals, continues to map the coordinates as he sings how “it never hurts to give thanks to the local gods, you never know who might be hungry” or “to scan the windows on the upper floor” as the song builds to the impending siege, ending on wailing sax.
A long-time influence, Ozzy Osbourne, the ‘bat boy’, is the subject of the paradoxically acoustic, Bowie-esque Passaic 1975, the venue for the third date on the debut Blizzard of Oz tour, and tells of his struggles with alcohol and drugs with Black Sabbath in the 1970.
Returning more directly to the concept, Clemency For The Wizard King is again underpinned by Jon Wurster’s drums, a folksy shuffle of a piano dotted repeated melody line, the keys carrying the baton over into Possum By Night which is, apparently, sung from the animal’s point of view in an increasingly dangerous world with “Days of refuge in short supply”, ending with a “once more unto the breach” rallying cry.
The uptempo walking beat title track with its pedal steel flourishes draws together the album’s themes about being true to yourself when “people talk all kinds of trash” and namechecks Boris Vallejo, the Peruvian fantasy and erotica artist perhaps best-known for the Barbarella movie poster.
The earlier mention of baseball finds expression in the organ backed, wheel-turning rhythms of Doc Gooden who, as I’m sure sport buffs will know, refers to Dwight Gooden, the former pro baseball pitcher who played in 16 Major League seasons, including for the New York Mets and New York Yankees only to lose his mojo to the influence of cocaine and alcohol, the lyrics referencing his brief 1996 comeback.
If you’re a fan of the band, you’ll know that Going Invisible 2 is a sequel to a former B side, a simple organ and drums arrangement underpinning the inspirational refrain “I’m gonna burn it all down today/And sweep all the ashes away.”
Another influence surfaces with the inevitably country-tinged train time chug of Waylon Jennings Live! the song’s narrator, an arms dealer on his way to the Mexican border, “Drunk at the Meskwaki casino/Right where God intended me to be/Looking up at the one man in this room/Who’s handled more cocaine then me.”
Opening on suitably sombre organ notes that set the subsequent narcotic mood with its pulsing marching drumbeat, the penultimate An Antidote For Strychnine presumably harks back to his days of addiction (“Call the hotline/Give them a phoney last name”), gathering in tempo with keyboard frills and woodwinds. The curtain comes down in anthemic form with Sicilian Clan, Darnielle calling it a Spandau Ballet pastiche and likening it to New Order and The Alarm, the rhythm section and surging piano carrying along a lyric declaring “Hope for the best/Prepare for the worst” sung in the voice of someone hailing the advent of a fascist-style leader as, echoing the increasing political climate in Europe, “We wait like stock-piled landmines/Ready to burst.”
For all their exhaustive touring and extensive recordings, the band remain something of a cult, only three of their albums breaking the American Top 100, the highest, a concept album about professional wrestling, reaching 65, but, nevertheless, they have a devoted following which will rightly see this as one of their greatest triumphs. Any collateral fallout in terms of reaching new ears will be a deserved bonus.
John Darnielle and Matt Douglas will be touring the UK and Ireland this November in support of the album:
November 15 – London, 02 Shepherds Bush Empire
November 16 – Leeds, Brudenell Social Club
November 17 – Leeds, Brudenell Social Club
November 18 – Glasgow, St Luke’s
November 20 – Dublin, Button Factory
photo credit: Jeremy Lange