2008: Heretic Pride
Most of the songs that Darnielle wrote immediately after recording Get Lonely were fueled by a feeling that’s hard to name. It’s not loneliness or anger, exactly, although both of those things are in them. Heretic pride—the title of Get Lonely’s follow-up—is a little more like it, heretic pride being what you feel when you’ve been condemned for something basic about yourself that you can’t or won’t give up, and they’re coming for you but you’re still not going to give it up and so they’re just going to have to kill you. “It is about all sorts of people,” Darnielle said of Heretic Pride in a 2007 interview, “most of whom are sort of like gunfighters who realize they haven’t got anything in the chamber. More up-tempo than the last album.”
A lot more up-tempo, not only because of the adrenaline rush of all of the doomed gunfighter situations but because there was now a third member of Mountain Goats: Jon Wurster, one of the very best drummers in indie rock (and beyond—seriously, he’s amazing). Wurster joined Darnielle and Hughes for the recording of Heretic Pride in August 2007, toured with them later that year, and by February 2008, when Heretic Pride was released, he was a permanent member of the band. In the Paste video of the band’s astonishing performance of “In the Craters of the Moon” at the Bottom of the Hill on March 2, 2008, you can hear and see how much of a difference he was already making.
Wurster builds a bad vibe out of the toms in the first verse (If the strain proves too much/Give up right away/If the light hurts your eyes/Stay in your room all day) and then starts lightly battering the snare. In the midst of the second verse, after Darnielle sings “Well the blood’s in the water/And the shark’s gonna come/And we swim in the dark/Until our bodies are numb,” he crashes a cymbal, and they’re off:
Blind desert rats in the moonlight
Too far from shore
In the declining years
Of the long war
—after which, over a repeated F-G-Am from Darnielle and Hughes, Wurster whole-kit drums like he’s the band’s soloist. He drops out on a crash, and Darnielle, quietly, over a simple Dm-Am, sings “Empty room with a lightbulb/Where the phone starts to ring,” at which point his eyes roll up into his head. “Everybody gets nervous/Nobody says anything”: he takes a step back and says, off-mic, “I don’t know what happened tonight.” “Next day someone’s initials/Show up on the door”—and now Wurster’s back in, and his pounding 1/32 notes drive them through the final chorus (In the declining years/Of the long war) and into a reprise of the mid-song instrumental section, this time with even more wildly flailing energies and tons of distortion on Darnielle’s guitar.
It’s intoxicating. So is the studio version of the song, especially when it hits the final chorus, but not to this degree. The production of Heretic Pride, which was handled by Scott Solter (Get Lonely) and John Vanderslice (We Shall All Be Healed, The Sunset Tree), sometimes has the effect of reducing the songs’ weirdness and intensity, and you have to go to the live recordings, in those cases, to get a full sense of what the songs have in them. “Autoclave,” as performed at the Independent on March 1, 2008, is an especially good example.
Darnielle sings quietly, at first, with a little tremor in his voice (Hand me your hand, let me look in your eyes), while he and Hughes cycle through a C, C/B, G/A(5), G pattern and Wurster, drumming with brushes, holds down a beat that sounds like barely controlled panic. By the time that Darnielle sings, in the chorus, “I am this great unstable mass of blood and foam,” it’s like he’s been drawn by the song into a state of being that allows him to mean every word. In the final verse, he flies up an octave and shouts, with a melody somewhere in his voice,
I dreamt that I was perched atop a throne of human skulls
On a cliff above the ocean, howling wind and shrieking seagulls
And the dream went on forever, one single static frame
Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name
On the album, the pop-leaning arrangement can make that last line, which is from the Cheers theme song, sound ’90s ironic. In the performance at the Independent, it’s nothing like that. The song leads you to something nightmarish on the far horizon of human experience, and it’s from there, from that distant, empty place, that Darnielle shouts/sings the line. It’s awful to hear, awful to even know about.
But you’ve gone somewhere. (“This is a song about alcohol, and . . . the ways it can bring a relationship to a place that it mightn’t’ve gone before,” Darnielle says before a 2003 performance of “Prana Ferox.” “A bad place, but a place that it mightn’t’ve gone before.”) You go to the extremes of love and vulnerability in “San Bernardino” (We were safe inside/And our new son cried), and to the extremes of anger and paranoia in “Lovecraft in Brooklyn” (saved for later), and to the extremes of martyr-ecstasy in “Heretic Pride” (I will burn hotter than the sun). And even when you don’t go to extremes, even in a “throwing paint at a canvas” song like “Sax Rohmer #1,” you almost always travel somewhere new. In the opening verses of that song, the speaker reports on a situation in a city, a situation that keeps getting stranger and more violent without ever making any more sense than it did in the first place. There’s dissipating fog, dawn, an agent emerging from the shadows in an alleyway, piles of broken bricks, drunken sailors, hopeless urchins, and spies washing in on the tide. “And I am coming home to you,” Darnielle sings, in a loud, reed-thin voice, “With my own blood in my mouth/And I am coming home to you/If it’s the last thing that I do.” In the last two verses, the situation in the city collapses into a bad, weird dream—ringing bells, howling wolves, chalk marks on high windowsills, a dozen hawks descending on a rabbit, capsized and sunken ships, and that agent in the alleyway again—and when the chorus comes around a second time, Darnielle sings it with an energy that has “that dude’s-gonna-come-unglued feel.” Nothing happens, but things get more intense anyway. “Every moment points towards the aftermath,” Darnielle sings, and then, with something a little frightening in his voice, he goes, “Yeah-eah-eah.”
You’re not going to give it up. They’re just going to have to kill you. “Michael Myers Resplendent,” the last song on the album, begins with long, pedaled piano chords, Hughes’s thick bass, and Erik Friedlander’s swelling, expressive cello. From the perspective of an actor who played Michael Myers in the Halloween movies—there were lots of them—Darnielle sings, “I am ready for my closeup today/Too long I've let my self-respect stand in my way.” Then Darnielle sings short lines, Wurster fills the measure with four hard slams, and the song relaxes into a rocking-back-and-forth E-C#m-F#m-A/Am chorus, in which things get disturbing:
But when the house goes up in flames
No one emerges triumphantly from it
When the scum begins to circle the drain
Everybody loves a winner
By allowing himself to go to a bad place, a place somewhere out there beyond self-respect, the actor can live for a little while in the glow of Michael Myers’ resplendence, his crazy killer vibe. But he’s not Michael Myers, he’s not a winner, he’s not loved by everybody. “I spent eight hours in my makeup chair,” the actor sings in the second verse, “Waxed my chest and shaved off all my hair.” He’s tightly framed against the fire, the place of non-triumph, hairless, abject, and when, after the last chorus, he sings two of its lines in a falsetto voice—“When the house goes up in flames . . . When the scum begins to circle the drain”—it’s like he knows it, all of it. He’s still inside the vision of resplendence—this is America, after all—but he is, at the same time, aflame with the building, circling the drain with the scum.
A feeling grows, as I listen to the album, the feeling that everything I encounter is itself and about to become something else. “Transfiguration’s gonna come for me at last,” Darnielle sings in “Heretic Pride,” when the reckoning is arriving for the martyr-to-be, and when he does, I feel like I’m near the album’s core. In “Tianchi Lake,” I’m even nearer.
“Children by the water banks/Laughing long and loud”—the song’s first lines—reappear, in the next two lines, as “Changbai’s high fine western peaks/Just beneath the clouds.” “Currents in the water/Churning in their course” take the form of a creature with the “[b]ody of a sea lion” and a “[h]ead just like a horse.” It keeps going like that in the second verse: a sand drawing of a preacher seems like it’s starting to speak; branches tossed by “[h]igh winds in the treetops” look like “[l]ow-flying winter geese.” Only for a moment, though, in all these cases—a moment with “no one taking pictures,” with “everybody still.” And then “the water sought its course again/The way that waters will.” That night, though, there’s a kind of miracle:
No one at the lakeside now
Moon up in the sky
Night birds in the dragon spruce
Moaning long and high
Backstroking on the surface
Moonlight on its face
Floats the Tianchi monster
Staring into space
It’s as if the image of the creature in the churning water has become what its viewers momentarily thought it was, as if the story of the monster is also a story about how amazing our imaginations are.
“My standing theme,” Darnielle said in one of his Heretic Pride interviews, “is how people find value in their lousy situations, people finding something to be pleased with in a situation that will surely result in their doom.” The reggae singer Prince Far I (born Michael James Williams), shot in his house and dying on his floor, thinks,
Try, try your whole life
To be righteous and be good
Wind up on your own floor
Choking on blood (“Sept. 15 1983”)
Or someone else thinks it. In the next line, the speaker quick-shifts the scene to wherever he is, a place where he’s half-telling, half-imagining Prince Far I’s story. “The heat drifts/Across the land,” he sings. “If I forget you, Israel/Let me forget my right hand.” He’s imagining hard, in this beautifully detailed song, so much so that the whole scene really is, as he sings, “like a movie.” And that—that defiant, lonely, ferocious act of the imagination—is heretic pride too. It’s how most people, most of the time, “find value in their lousy situations.” (“No matter what they say,” the new father says to the new mother in “San Bernardino”’s tiny motel bathroom, “We’re gonna be okay.”) All of our situations will surely result, eventually, in our doom (Every moment leads towards its own sad end/Yeah-eah-eah). But just try to take my kaleidoscopic blast of memory- and imagination-traces away from me. “I want to cry out/But I don’t scream and I don’t shout,” Darnielle sings in “Heretic Pride.” “And I feel so proud to be alive.” Yeah.