2017: Goths
In October 2017, five months after Goths came out, the Mountain Goats released Marsh Witch Visions, an EP of songs about Ozzy Osbourne. If you take those four songs and add to them the Internet-released “Going to California,” the live-only “Song for Black Sabbath’s Second North American Tour,” and the In League with Dragons-released “Passaic 1975,” you have more than half of a fantastic LP, written and performed from somewhere in the haunted space between Darnielle and Ozzy (or the Ozzy of his imagination, at least). In each of the songs, which are guitar and voice only, Ozzy’s origins (working-class, in an impoverished industrial city) loom large, even when they’re not being directly referenced. They give him power (Drums rolling like buffalo down the plain/And I am an oncoming train/Me and the ghosts of Birmingham) and fill him with a strange, lost-feeling sadness (Set sail for the cosmos/High above the world and its beaten-down men). The sadness is pretty clearly Darnielle’s as well, and it seems to be, in part, a sadness about his own beaten-down origins. The hammer that Ozzy used in a Birmingham slaughterhouse floats in the backdrop of the songs (Hang my hammer on a nail/Never see it again), as does the ghostly dagger-ish object that appears in the mists of “Marsh Witch Vision” (What is this I see before me?). Guilt and the specter of violence melt into drinking and doing drugs (Floating like a Portugese man o’ war/Pretty hardcore), which open up a gradually shrinking space between exuberance (I love you all) and pain. “Burned-up jewelry at the inquest/Cold now to the touch,” Darnielle sings in “Going to California,” a song about the mid-tour plane crash that killed Ozzy’s 25-year-old guitarist Randy Rhoads. And then, from deep within the interior of Ozzy, as Darnielle imagines him, “Feel so . . . bad/So afraid/Of the road/Up ahead.” In real life, Ozzy got back on the road after Rhoads’s death and his feelings were beaten down. In the song, which has one more chorus left—“Going back/To California”—Ozzy’s feelings hover long enough to become a kind of atmosphere, a troubled, uncertain space that Darnielle and his listeners can momentarily share with one another.
Goths is up to something else. It was tracked in a well-equipped studio in Nashville, for one thing, and several other musicians were involved: in addition to Hughes, Wurster, and Matt Douglas, who was now a full-time member of the band, there were the fourteen members of the Nashville Symphony Chorus, who sang on “Rain in Soho,” and the four backup singers on “We Do It Different on the West Coast” and “Wear Black.” Its songs are often slightly jazzy—Darnielle mainly plays an electric piano on a Fender Rhodes setting—and rich with vocal harmonies. Midway through the recording session, the band realized that they hadn’t used any non-bass guitars yet and decided to keep it that way: they ended up putting a “NO GUITARS” notice on the back of the album, inverting the no-synths statements on the back of every Queen album up until The Game. And the subject of Goths is, as the title indicates, not a person (like Ozzy) or an occupationally defined group of people (like professional wrestlers) but a briefly flickering category of persons, a marginalized type of social identity that mostly came and went in the 1980s. Darnielle was a Goth, or part of a Goth subset, for a couple of years in the mid-1980s; he wore black, dyed his hair black, wore death-oriented makeup, and listened to bands like Christian Death.1 But even though his experiences play into pretty much every one of the songs on Goths, the album isn’t about those experiences, à la We Shall All Be Healed or The Sunset Tree. It’s more about Goth-ness as a shareable vision, a way in which a lot of people who felt like outcasts found a place in the world.
It opens with a slow, feeling-of-three melody over a pounding F#m.
There’s more space around the piano and drums than usual, and, pretty soon, there’s a male chorus singing doom-y “ooohs” and coming in, twice, with a finger-wagging “No, no, no, no.” “No” and its variants—“no one,” “nothing”—are the song’s keywords, and death is its obsession (No one broke D. B. Cooper’s fall/No one hopes to hear the bagman call). Darnielle sings the verses, which don’t seem to arise from any particular person or place, in a deep voice—not as deep as the one he drops into for the band’s amazing cover of Sisters of Mercy’s “Lucretia My Reflection” in late 2017, but still, further down into the depersonalizing part of the vocal register than he usually goes. And then he jumps up, vocally, into a bridge that illuminates a fragment of the goth scene in London (the song’s title is “Rain in Soho”):
There’s a club where you’d like to go
You could meet someone who’s lost like you
Revel in the darkness like a pair of open graves
Fumble through the fog for a season or two
In the Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now?” Morrissey sings,
There’s a club, if you’d like to go
You could meet somebody who really loves you
So you go and you stand on your own, and you leave on your own
And you go home and you cry and you want to die—
which is of course not the same thing at all. In “Rain in Soho,” there’s someone else there, whether in fantasy or in reality, someone who’s lost like you, an open grave like you, in darkness and fog like you, reveling and fumbling for a little while. It’s not a song about yearning hopelessly for “somebody who really loves you”; it’s a song about finding someone who’s a lot like you, someone who’s a part of your scene. The hyper-animating cymbal crash that follows the bridge takes those feelings up another level, and that’s where Darnielle sings from in the final verse. In the company of others like you, in clubs like the Batcave, you don’t have to explain your styles and preferences; you can just project your vision outward and follow it forward. The chorus’s final, falsetto note, over Wurster’s ferocious drumming, turns that throw-it-and-catch-up-to-it energy into something that is capable of changing the way your body feels to you.
Then there’s an abrupt stylistic shift into the super-Kinks-like “Andrew Eldritch Is Moving Back to Leeds” (Eldritch was the lead singer of Sisters of Mercy), followed by another stylistic shift into “The Grey King and the Silver Flame Attunement,” a slinky story-song about riding in a Pontiac Grand Am that’s being driven by a death-chasing guy with pointed teeth. And so on, shift after shift, for the entirety of the album, not only between songs but within songs. The snappy pop verses of “We Do It Different on the West Coast” segue into choruses in which the chords, complexified by the harmonies of the backup singers, sort of sit separately from one another, each of them bathed in its own tone and mood. Two-thirds of the way through the minor-key “Shelved,” there’s a transition to a major key, a fresh, chorus-pedaled bass solo—played way up the neck, so as to sound as Cure-like as possible—and a brightly sunlit verse written and sung by Hughes. But there’s other kinds of shifts too. Towards the end of “Abandoned Flesh,” the bantering comedy of the verses tightens (But the world came to agree/What you see is what you get, and what you get is what you see), tightens again (Because the world will never know or understand . . .), and then goes enigmatic and gorgeous (. . . The suffocated splendor/Of the once and future Goth band). The lightly bouncy “Unicorn Tolerance” pursues a creature-of-the-night aesthetic (Drawn to the dark/Covered by the blood when possible) into a dark graveyard, where, pressed by flutes, something breaks through the stylization:
And when the clouds do clear away
Get a momentary chance to see
The thing I’ve been trying to beat to death
The soft creature that I used to be
The better animal I used to be
The softer, younger, child-like self doesn’t deserve to be beaten to death. But neither does the Goth self, even though it’s been administering the beating. “Long life to the spiders!” Darnielle sings in the last verse. “Safe travels to the crow!/Love to the ghosts/Who taught me everything I know.” “Try to remember,” he wrote in a 2005 haiku, “So many sides to all things!/Big blue California sky.”
Technically, Goths isn’t a Goth album; it’s an album with a spread of aesthetics, an array of stylishnesses. But that, Darnielle seems to be saying, is what Gothdom most essentially was, and what it can be for us now if we learn how to remember it better.2 When he was 18 and 19 years old in Portland, he spent a lot of nights dancing at a queer club called the City whose owner welcomed young people and made the space available to them as a kind of home. “[It] saved my life,” Darnielle said on Tumblr in 2015. In a 2014 article about the club in Portland’s Willamette Week, he’s quoted as saying, “The City taught me that it was OK to be who I am. There isn’t any more important gift you can give to an artist, or to a person.”3 It was okay for each person in the City to do it different; the “we” in that club was an always-changing crowd of who-I-ams (Check me out, I can’t blend in/Check me out, I’m young and ravishing). In a June 2017 article in The Fandomentals about why the Mountain Goats have so many LGTBQ+ fans, the writer, Anna, suggests that it has to do with the fact that Darnielle “tells stories of the abandoned social outcasts and castaways in conflict with everything around them, coping in what way they know best and in every unadvisable and dangerous manner. All of these feelings are relevant to the very core of LGTBQ+ experience.” “I think that the way that JD tells such realistic and beautiful stories that illustrate people who aren’t necessarily always portrayed in the media is what draws LGBTQ+ folks in,” writes Maggie, one of the Mountain Goats fans quoted in the article. “His characters may not be necessarily LGBTQ+, but there’s an ‘outsider-ness’ that feels that way all the same.” On Goths, there’s a sharper-than-usual focus on those kinds of do-it-different selfhoods, along with a much stronger sense of how such differences can become the basis of group identifications (“I’m hardcore, but I’m not that hardcore,” Darnielle sings, in a way that invites others to sing along with him, in the chorus of “The Grey King and the Silver Flame Attunement”). Instead of a single ideal self that the characters are trying and failing to sustain, as on Beat the Champ and Marsh Witch Visions, there’s an in-this-together clustering of marginalized selves and styles.
That feeling of difference-based togetherness is most intense, for me, in the next-to-last song on Goths, “For the Portugese Goth Bands.”
Over insistent, rapid drumming and stop-and-start bass riffs, Darnielle sings, in a falsetto, “Set the spectrum for the grayscale, that’s better.” In the midst of all the grays between black and white, the speaker, who doesn’t use the word “I,” tells us what they like most: Gothic-font type and Romeo-and-Juliet stories. The reverbed piano and vibraphone take a strange path through the first three lines of the key-of-C song: Bm6-Csus4-Dsus2-F, followed by Fm7-Em7-Am. But now they go to an F and wait, then go to a F/G and wait, while Darnielle sings, “And that one Celtic Frost record/Almost everybody hates.” It’s like the music has grown more spacious and expectant, and under those circumstances, you can sense even more vividly the poetry—the tight phrasings, the interplay of rhythms, the slightly shifting moods—in those deceptively simple lines.4 The same thing happens in the last lines of the next two verses: “Bleed bile all night/Into an SM-58”—an SM-58 is a great low-cost mic—and “Headline really big festivals/Every other summer in Brazil.” In all three cases, after Darnielle falls silent, there’s a satisfying melodic resolution—four beats of a transitional G and a chorus-starting C—but it’s nowhere near as powerful as what happens in me while I’m sitting on the F and the F/G, waiting for the chords to crest. “The strings on [Abba’s] ‘Dancing Queen,’ you listen to that and just the chord changes accomplish so much emotionally,” Darnielle told an interviewer in 2011. “People will say that’s not a direct expression of feeling, but I say yes it is.” The point of “For the Portugese Goth Bands” is just to share with the imagined, Moonspell-like band a moment in which they’re listening to a record they like, singing bilious things all night, playing nationally sponsored concerts, or whatever—a moment when everything’s better than you have any right to expect it to be, when a measure’s worth of strings is like a message from the beyond. Or when “in-TO an ESS-em FIF-ty-EIGHT” makes you so happy and upset that you want to die. “Keep what’s precious, drop what’s not,” the band-speaker sings. “Without a second thought.”
“I dyed my hair black, and I had a teacher who said I dressed like an undertaker,” Darnielle said in 2017. “But was I living [a goth lifestyle] and using white pancake makeup and stuff? No. My deal was largely music that was depressing and desperate and about death. I consider myself sort of a sub-category of goth. My tastes are very broad and always have been. I’ve never been the kind of guy who can commit to a scene.” He did commit to the music, though. “When I was 19, having read a preview in [Portland’s] Willamette Week for a Celtic Frost show, and being unable to go because the venue was 21-and-up, I made a mental note to listen to that band when I got a chance,” he told an interviewer. “Maybe a year later I found the Tragic Serenades EP at Music Plus in Pomona, California. I would say that EP was the push into the deep end for me; it was so weird and unique. You couldn’t just let it play, you had to deal with it.”
Goth music, too, was only very loosely defined. It was always “a vague template of suggestions: mid-tempo rock/pop songs, sticking largely to minor keys and performed or produced with a host of subcultural signifiers pushed up front,” Darnielle wrote in a 2006 article. “If that sounds like a negative, it shouldn’t,” he went on to say. “The surest way to limit a genre’s shelf life is to tie its hands behind its back; the tighter the restrictions on style, the less room there's going to be for creativity, which will make your genre quite inviting for chronic handwashers but unappealing to, y’know, artists. The glory of goth, as it turns out, isn’t the hair (though it certainly was awesome) or the fishnets (though I’d personally pay money to ensure their return to prominence) or even the band names (though on a pound-for-pound basis they make the current crop of MySpace favorites look like schoolmarms)—it’s the fun of it all” (Darnielle, “Life After Death,” Philadelphia City Paper, 7 September 2006).
“Many of the people who danced [at the City] are dead now, but the people who were there know it was a transformative place of profound personal liberation,” Darnielle said in 2017. “It was an amazing queer dance club where I would go four nights a week when I could and stay until 4 in the morning. It was super-important to me.”
“Words exist in the air, and they are given weight and rhythm in the way we read them,” Darnielle said in 2015. “This is sort of an eccentric position and most people are in the totally opposite place, that words are not supposed to be read out loud and something that happens between the eyes and the page. But to me, it’s about the tongue, the air, and the ear. . . . That’s where poetry and literature live for me.”