The Mountain Goats, All Eternals Deck
Reviewed by: Chris Bosman
It’s just about impossible to determine just how many full-length releases John Darnielle, the man behind the Mountain Goats moniker, has put out. This is because Darnielle’s early output was in the form of home-recorded four track demos of lyrics and acoustic guitar, and dude was fucking prolific. There are oodles of the things, and that doesn’t even count the singles and shorter-length pieces he released during that time. Hell, the man still finds tracks tucked away in his closet. Since Tallahassee, the first album that the Mountain Goats put out on a “major” indie label, that frenetic output has slowed, replaced by a focus of craft on wrenching every ounce of emotion out of a song. The backbone of most of Darnielle’s output is still the acoustic guitar and his winding, eclectic lyricism, but now his energies are focused not simply on getting his thoughts out, but on sharpening their blades down to the finest edge.
All Eternals Deck is Darnielle’s latest, and the seventh of his more “official” releases. On it, the man and his approaching-permanent collaborators (Peter Hughes and John Wursher) traverse just about every style that Darnielle has explored since Tallahassee. All of those records did some amount of exploring, but they all seemed to have a specific mood to them, such as Get Lonely’s plaintive hopeful/hopelessness or The Sunset Tree’s hard-won catharsis. There’s less of a specific mood to All Eternals Deck, but the comparative eclecticism that Darnielle displays is ultimately what makes the record such a strong one.
That variety is on display within the first three tracks. Opener “Damn These Vampires” is Darnielle using the term not in the supernatural sense, but in a bitter defamation of blood suckers in the real world, but does so behind gentle pianos and through a blue-collar sense of struggle. “Birth of Serpents” then is a jaunty acoustic ballad, where the guitars are bright to the point of almost sounding like ukuleles. And then “Estate Sale Sign” explodes through the gate like it’s a three-chord punk song with all of the distortion pedals broken and Darnielle wailing, unhinged. It’s a revealing trio that exposes just why Darnielle is such a lauded songwriter; each story is communicated as much through his emoting and arrangement as it is through his carefully crafted wordplay.
There’s some stuff we haven’t heard Darnielle attempt here, too. “High Hawk Season” sounds like something that would come out of a back-porch Western musical, with a rustic barbershop quartet of voices singing back-up vocals, giving the otherwise spare track a sense of rural drama. Album highlight “Outer Scorpion Song” sounds like a modernized version of 40s orchestral pop, with a Perry Como piano line and some drop dead gorgeous string swells; it’s one of Darnielle’s strongest tracks ever, even without knowing a single lyric. And the final chord and heart-heavy silence that follows makes a great introduction to the more standard “For Charles Bronson” that follows.
Lyrics have often paid a very important role in Darnielle’s work. However, on the previous Mountain Goats album– the wildly conceptual The Life of the World to Come– that strength became almost a hindrance. Too often on Life, it felt as though the concept was more important than crafting intriguing musical accompaniments. Darnielle had a concept for Eternals as well, but it was far looser. The man compared it to tarot card reading scenes in 70s occult movies and “that one scene in The Warriors where they’re on the train and the sun’s coming up and they’re safe but you know the scars are permanent now” on the official Mountain Goats website. And that idea of concept as more of a feeling contributes both to the variety present on All Eternals Deck and its lasting power. I don’t know if I know many of the lyrics on Eternals even now, but it seems much less important than it did on previous Mountain Goats records. Instead, I feel everything Darnielle is attempting to communicate in the tone of the keyboard on closer “Liza Forever Minnelli” or the single piano notes on “Beautiful Gas Mask.” Darnielle’s been doing this a long time, and All Eternals Deck synthesizes his career’s strengths into a singular, powerful statement.