2000: The Coroner’s Gambit
In April 1998, Darnielle and Chavanothai got married, and later that year, they moved to Colo, a town twenty miles east of Ames, Iowa.
In the summer of 1999, they moved again, to Ames, to be closer to the USDA Agricultural Research Service, where Lalitree had a job as a lab technician.
Darnielle picked up work here and there; once, in Colo, he had a job on a grain elevator. He played ten Mountain Goats shows in 1998, seventeen in 1999, and eleven in 2000.1 He released a six-song EP, New Asian Cinema, in 1998, and nothing at all in 1999 (other than two compilations of unreleased or hard-to-find Mountain Goats songs: Protein Source of the Future . . . Now! and Bitter Melon Farm). “Between Full Force Galesburg and The Coroner’s Gambit, there was about a year there where I didn’t have any good ideas,” he told Salon in 2013. In the early months of 1998, however, he had written a pair of songs that had given him the idea of “a record about death and terminal places”: “Tampa”—a “terribly dark song about someone who finds a body buried in the snow”—
and “Family Happiness”: “one of those screaming angry kill-me-now songs.”2
In October 2000, the album that grew out of that idea, The Coroner’s Gambit, was finally released. “This is the new record,” Darnielle said, holding it up, to an audience in Carrboro, North Carolina, that month. “It took three years. I apologize for that. I’m going to return to something resembling my old pace.”
Musically, as well as topically, the songs seemed to come out of the same place. Darnielle rarely wrote songs in minor keys back then, but “Tampa” and “Family Happiness” are both in Em, as is “Shower,” a song from early 1997 that “sort of defined the energy” of The Coroner’s Gambit (neither it nor “Tampa” made the final cut).
All three songs are played and sung way out on the edge. “You can soak in a bathtub full of gasoline, but you will/Never get your hands clean,” he sings in “Tampa,” over a nasty little Em pull-off from B to Bb. “Look at the person I've turned into/Tell me how do you like him now,” he sings, heatedly, in “Family Happiness.” And in “Shower” (Get out the crystal/Break out the good champagne/We’re going down/In flames), he just “goes crazy and beats the hell out of the guitar.” On a couple of occasions, Darnielle has told interviewers that he takes a lot of inspiration from something that Jim Dandy, the frontman of Black Oak Arkansas, said during the band’s down years: “Whether we’re playing to 30,000 people at Texxas Jam in ’78 or 30 people here tonight at the Lightbulb Club, Black Oak Arkansas attacks the stage with the ferocity of a caged wolverine.” In his live performances of “Shower,” “Family Happiness,” and “Tampa,” Darnielle attacks with the same kind of ferocity, even when there’s not very many people there.
You can feel that prana ferox throughout The Coroner’s Gambit. At first, you sense it mostly in the overtly aggressive songs, like “Jaipur” (saved for later), and the menacing little songs about wickedness, like “Trick Mirror” and “Scotch Grove.” When you listen a little longer, though, you can feel it pretty much everywhere. The speakers who long for death (“Island Garden Song,” “The Coroner’s Gambit”) and the speakers who mourn lost friends (“‘Bluejays and Cardinals,’” “Shadow Song,”) are all fiercely oriented toward finality. “Horseradish Road,” a quiet little song with a pizzicato violin, is about two guilty people (You’ve done something awful/I’ve done something worse) in an about-to-crash car; “Onions,” an early-spring song with a little hop in it, seems to about someone who gets badly depressed at that time of year, someone singing to the thing growing inside him (Springtime's coming, that means you'll be coming back around/New onions growing underground). In a 2001 interview, Darnielle says that after writing “Family Happiness” and “Tampa,” he thought, “Why not point the whole album toward the grave?” Not make it about the grave: point it toward the grave.3 The album is defined not by where it’s going, song by song, but by the way that it’s going there: ferociously, as if in the state of dread and desire that precedes the moment of maximum impact. Even in the beautiful, soft, almost-too-late love song “There Will Be No Divorce,” the radio at 5 a.m. is roaring with static, as if it’s hungry for blood, and when the singer’s lover puts her hair in a ponytail, it’s as if she’s hoping that God is going to grab her by it and pull. Everything’s ratcheted up, everything’s tossed in, and everything’s drawing on something mysterious in the singer and the song.
All of that forcefulness seems to light up new imaginative and linguistic resources in Darnielle.
I was sitting in the recliner with the TV on
When you said something evil, and then you were gone
Explosives in the water main
A blown fuse
College graduation photograph
Splashed all over the six o’clock news (“Insurance Fraud #2)
Long vowels spill like liquid from your mouth
I hang on every word you say
An army of transistor radios on the bookshelf
Left on all day
Let them play
Yeah, let ’em all play on and on and on
Let ’em all play longer and louder
Long after you’re gone (“We Were Patriots”)
Maybe because the situations are so extreme—I’m supposed to cash in the insurance policy of someone who’s faking their death, I’m in a house in Calcutta with rows of radios playing all day long—Darnielle makes freer use of his verbal capacities. In “Insurance Fraud #2,” the everyday language is kicked by the word “evil” (how evil?) into four lines that are lexically rich, thick with stresses, and imagistic. The first line I’ve quoted from “We Were Patriots” is heavily assonant, alliterative, and figurative, but the next line drops back into plain talk (I hang on every word you say), and the two lines after that follow the rhythms of ordinary speech out into an image that's alive with strangeness (An army of transistor radios on the bookshelf/Left on all day). Eloquence can feel sadistic at times—usually, I think, when it’s indifferent to its occasion or when it isn’t motivated by something that taps into strong feelings. Here, though, eloquence floods inexplicably into the mix and then ebbs just as inexplicable out of it, as if Darnielle has impulsively, not intellectually, opened a channel into the physical and hallucinatory qualities of language.
It all comes back to the intensity of the songs’ orientation toward a terminal place. That intensity demands forms of expression that will match it, even when the song is, musically, relatively calm. “Elijah,” for example, only briefly departs, in its bridge, from its simple, lightly strummed chord pattern: I-IV-V in A, with the A swapped out for its relative minor in the third line of every verse.
What makes it unforgettable is that its lyrics are so responsive to the extremity of the situation: an Elijah/Jesus, about to return from the dead, is asking someone to ritually, sensually prepare for him. “Streak the windows, smear the walls with coconut oil, yeah,” the Elijah-figure says. “Fill the cast-iron kettle with water and magnolia blossom/Let it boil, let the water roll, let the fire take its toll/I’m coming home, I’m coming home.” After the bridge, when the verse comes around for the third time, Darnielle takes it higher, both as a writer and as a singer:
Let the incense burn in every room
Feel the fullness of time in the empty tomb
Feel the future kicking in your womb
I’m coming home, I’m coming home
His voice breaks on “room” and it feels like it takes a lot out of him just to sing the third line, which, this time through, doesn’t dip down to the relative minor. Elijah hasn’t arrived; he is, in the song, permanently on the verge of arriving. You replay the song to re-experience that excruciating tension, as if it’s as close as you can get to your ultimacy, the thing you are ultimately seeking, whatever that may be.
“The Alphonse Mambo” runs off the same energy.
Like “Elijah” (and “Baboon,” “Horseradish Road,” and “Onions”), it was recorded in the Omaha, Nebraska studio of the singer/songwriter Simon Joyner, which is why you hear, at the beginning of the song, someone playing a series of whole-note Ds on a better-than-Casio keyboard. In the first two verses, over a D-E7-G-D progression, Darnielle sings rapid-fire lines of various lengths, each of which reads, musically, as a departure from and return to the keyboard’s near-droning D. At the beginning of the chorus, the guitar and keyboard hold a G chord and, in each of the chorus’s two lines, step up through A7sus4 to D: “And it’s gonna be just you and me today/Waiting for the other shoe to drop in Tampa Bay.” He delivers the next two verses in bursts of high-anxiety speech (I don’t want to talk about it now/Okay, okay . . . okay . . ./I just want to get this whole thing over with/I don't want to deal with it anymore), and when he sings, “And then I see you walk in through the door” at the end of the last verse, you can feel “the dreadful headache-y clarity of the whole situation . . . sort of cresting.”4 By the time we hit the last line—“Waiting for the other shoe to DROP in Tampa BAY”—Darnielle’s voice is wild and shaking, as if his intensity has taken him somewhere that even he wasn’t expecting to go.
“In John Darnielle’s voice, everything is urgent,” a reviewer for Pitchfork wrote in 2008. “He trembles through quiet moments like he’s straining for warmth in winter, and rattles through loud ones like a revving engine. . . . Trying to define his songs as happy or sad is irrelevant, because intensity—real, immolating intensity—is neither.” It’s true, mostly, and it’s especially true of the songs from the Coroner’s Gambit period—not just the ones I’ve mentioned so far, but also, say, this version of “Poltergeist,” this version of “You’re in Maya,” and this version of the Steely Dan cover “Doctor Wu,” all of which are from 1999. And this live version of “Baboon” (which is actually from 2006).
That’s what I’m talking about, that nearly insane vehemence, which is in the lyrics just as much as it’s in the music and the performance. “Pure power, stripped of meaning”—the senseless force of the sun, of the returning spring, of the metastasizing daisies, and of the speaker’s mood (My defenses may be working with a skeleton crew/But I’ll be skinned alive before I’ll take this from you). Sometimes people are surprised to learn that Darnielle loves the more brutal and furious kinds of metal, like, for instance, “finally-we’re-putting-the-basement-to-good-use raw-throated soil-stained exploding-toilet Finnish black metal,” which is “repetitive, swollen, unbelievably harsh and incredibly passionate.”5 It’s only surprising, though, if you haven’t registered the depth of Darnielle’s ferocity. Listen in and around The Coroner’s Gambit long enough and you will.
Everything I say about where and when and how often the Mountain Goats have performed is drawn from the “Live Shows” pages of the Mountain Goats Wiki (on Fandom): https://themountaingoats.fandom.com/wiki/The_Mountain_Goats_Wiki
Quotations are from Don Dillaman, “A Chat with the Mountain Goats,” Space City Rock 4 (Spring 2001): http://www.spacecityrock.com/issue4/mountaingoats1.html and Cory Brown, “Sermon on the Mount: The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle Composes Himself,” San Francisco Bay Guardian, 16 September 2004.
“All my songs are, in some way or another, love songs, but these ones try to point toward the grave whenever they can. . . . I was trying to convey a little chill down the neck, that little thrill you get when you think about something frightening. I hope that at two or three points on the record, the thrill-seeking collides with real sadness and makes something special and personal happen for the listener” (Darnielle, quoted in Michael Casey, “Here’s One for the Coroner,” Bergen County Record, 13 Oct 2000).
Introduction to “The Alphonse Mambo,” Chicago, Illinois, 6 December 2011 (transcription from Kyle Barbour’s The Annotated Mountain Goats).