At this point it’s lazy writing to liken John Darnielle: frontman and only constant member of The Mountain Goats: to some sort of religious speaker. It’s been done many times, and the fact that his band’s new album, The Life of the World To Come, names every song after a Bible verse makes it an even lazier move. But when seeing him perform, it’s hard to think of anything more apt than Darnielle as a preacher: or at least the leader of some sort of cult: with his raptured masses hanging onto and taking very, very personally his every word. The crowd at Seattle’s Showbox at the Market last Tuesday, Nov. 10, was one of these; Darnielle knew it, they knew it and there were moments of unbelievable energy between them.
The band is now expanded to a four-, sometimes five-piece with a full-time guitarist in Perry Wright and occasional strings from Owen Pallett, who as Final Fantasy is opening this tour and has previously done arranging work and toured with Beirut and Arcade Fire, among others. The effect is that Darnielle’s increasingly restrained, more subdued work is played as aggressively as possible. The set drew heavily from the new album, but also featured older songs like “Cotton,” with its bridges drum break beaten out hard by drummer Jon Wurster, and “Against Pollution,” which somehow nearly bordered on weird heartland rock in a way that the album version never will. The band’s best-known songs: “This Year,” “No Children,” “The Best Ever Death Mental Band In Denton”: were all treated as hits, usually beginning with Darnielle as singalong leader more than a lead singer, stepping away from the microphone for a bar or two before audibly joining in. When Darnielle spoke at length about moshing, his crowd moshed aggressively to what is, when it comes down to it, acoustic-electric singer-songwriter music with lots of syllables in the lyrics. The end of the set even prompted a stage dive as the band tore through an uptempo number about institutionalized youth. He was more than a little pleased by the fact that his music is now capable of inciting such responses.
Final Fantasy’s performance beforehand was a quietly fascinating thing. Like fellow violinist and clever person Andrew Bird, Pallett builds his compositions from looped lines and occasional use of an organ, but his songs follow less conventional structures and feature much stranger melodies, which sometimes works to his advantage. His forthcoming third album, Heartland, which is supposedly about “a young, ultra-violent farmer, speaking to his creator” in one-sided dialogue, will likely be worthy of investigation. His set ended with a song he attributed to long-dead cultural theorist Theodor Adorno called “Independence is No Solution For Modern Babies,” in which he called out Williamsburg and Greenpoint hipsters, among others, for wanting publicists and wanting only to dance; I couldn’t tell if the joke was well-received.
Aside from adding Wright (also of a rock band called the Prayers and Tears of Arthur Digby Sellers), the biggest change to the band is the fact that Darnielle is now playing piano, which makes sense, given that The Life features several songs on which the instrument dominates. Like almost all electric pianos, his didn’t sound great, but sort of got the job done, if by “job” one means “restricted motion and slowed things down a little.” Every Mountain Goats set, even the solo ones, opens with Darnielle’s “Hi, we’re the Mountain Goats,” and this didn’t come until after he’d finished opener “1 Samuel 15:23” and switched to guitar. The new songs call for atmospherics, and Wurster and bassist Peter Hughes were able to pull off hushed drones and builds where needed, but the piano is clearly something that the band hasn’t quite gotten used to or even something it may need. Regardless, Darnielle’s energy and the response it elicits carried the evening, and while he was addressing the converted, he did so masterfully.
