Mountain Goats: In League With Dragons review – deliciously detailed indie rock

(Merge)

The extraordinary career of John Darnielle – not just an astoundingly prolific musician, but also a podcaster, a novelist and a metal fan so devoted he wrote the 33⅓ book about Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality – continues with the 17th Mountain Goats album. It began life as a concept disc about “a besieged seaside community called Riversend, ruled by a benevolent wizard”, but – thankfully, perhaps – evolved into something rather different.

The best songs on In League With Dragons are character studies (contemporary analogues of his original wizard, Darnielle has said). In An Antidote for Strychnine, he seems to be contemplating a paranoid, survivalist scientist; on Waylon Jennings Live!, it’s a gangster stopping off at a country show in a Native American reservation casino (“Looking up at the one man in this room / Who’s handled more cocaine than me”); Doc Gooden tells of the baseball star whose lustre has faded, and who’s now at the ballparks where there are “Potholes in the parking lot / You feel the jolts a little harder every year”. Saddest of all is the rocker of Passaic 1975, whose exhortations to his crowd to get high have the air of a desperate chase after forgotten happiness.

Musically, too, the Mountain Goats – a four-piece at the moment – are in excellent form. Darnielle’s singing is far suppler than when the Mountain Goats was him and a guitar, and he has melodies to go with it: Done Bleeding is a melancholy swell, the title track a country knees-up with delicious harmonies, and throughout the record, drummer Jon Wurster is a secret weapon, bringing details that add but never distract.

Contributor

Michael Hann

The GuardianTramp

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