Well, we’re only a couple weeks away from the highly anticipated release of the new Mountain Goats album Heretic Pride. And happy day, a new video for the first single, “Sax Rohmer #1,” has just been released.
It’s an impressive single-shot feat, situated somewhere near the point where the minimalist-maximalist spectrum warps and doubles back on itself—a spot which might as well be called Point Mountain Goat. The video doesn’t dramatize the story the lyrics tell but rather dramatizes the textuality of the lyrics themselves. Here, watch, and then further thoughts after the jump:
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Though the video is brand new, an official MP3 of “Sax Rohmer #1” has been available for a while now. It’s been oft-spun in the Furymobile in recent weeks, and I’m feeling good about it and hopeful about the new album. No one does desperate defiance quite like John Darnielle, and this song’s pulp-inflected lyrics about (let’s say) a spy trying to come in from the cold but having to dodge snipers along the way feature him mining that rich vein again to good effect.
The refrain, “I am coming home to you / with my own blood in my mouth,” reminds me that Darnielle is one of the few contemporary songwriters who understands that mouths are good for something besides kissing and speaking. For instance:
“there’s fresh cranberries in your mouth
thick red water dripping out”—”Going to Bangor”“sick taste in my mouth
folger’s crystals and hardboiled eggs”—”From TG&Y”“we had hot caramel sticking to our teeth
and the only love I’d ever known burning underneath”—”The Recognition Scene”“we can taste fresh blood in our mouths again
there is no chance of getting enough of it”—”Weekend in Western Illinois”“I got cinnamon from Jakarta
for making french toast
the doctor says that I’ve got
thirty days left at most”—”Narakaloka”“on the morning you went away
the air was humid and the sky was gray
I had boiled peanuts for breakfast from Cairo, Georgia.”—”Alpha Omega“
I could go on. I won’t go on. You can go on if you want. My point: Along with his sometimes noted use of specific place names, his attention to the resonances and connotations of the tastes and textures of all things edible, advisably or not, is one of the main reasons that his songs often seem to carry such a visceral, sensual charge, one of the reasons that a five or six line song can evoke fully formed flesh-and-blood 3D world. And I think I’ve just worked out some math to explain why I sometimes can’t stop listening to “Alpha Omega”: place name + food reference = perfection.
One sure-to-be-discussed aspect of Heretic Pride is the production. Some longtime fans make a compelling case that Mountain Goats songs sound best accompanied by nothing more than wheel grind and maybe some untuned bass guitar. I understand that argument, even if I don’t subscribe to it: my intro to the band was when I bought Tallahassee and Bitter Melon Farm simultaneously one fateful day, so I don’t have any strong Dylan-plugs-in feelings about the 4AD studio era. To my untrained ears, We Shall All Be Healed is the best produced of the recent albums: it’s an album about excess and near disintegration, and the production reflects those themes—breaking glass sounds, distorted vocals—while also getting out of the way for the quieter moments of recovery and reconstitution in songs like “Cotton.” The minimal production and flat, post-electroshock style of Darnielle’s performance on “All Up the Seething Coast” makes lines like “And nothing you can say or do will stop me / And a thousand dead friends can’t stop me” quietly harrowing; the tension between the soaring strings and whatever is making that low droning sound in “Quito” well suits the song’s story of grasping for a last chance at redemption.
But back to “Sax Rohmer #1”: I’m ambivalent about the production and arrangements here. The drums sound great, first of all, and I’m looking forward to hearing more of them on the rest of the album. My problem is with the breaks after the chorus and between verses: the synth (is it a synth? Maybe I’ll be able to make it out more clearly on the CD) seems, if this makes any sense, intrusively tame; and now that I listen again, the same goes for the trickling keyboard figure that pops up in the middle of each verse. The narrative of the song has a forward momentum matched by the increasing urgency of Darnielle’s vocals, but that anemic synth bit seems out of step; it deflates the urgency that the other song elements work to create. It’s a distraction the song doesn’t need.
Still, these reservations notwithstanding, I have a good feeling about Heretic Pride. It’ll be here February 19. And by “here,” I mean “at my house, because I will be waiting outside the door of the record store when they open.” Here’s a recent interview about the album with John Darnielle at Drowned in Sound.
Note: something that occurred to me while looking through MG lyrics for taste examples is that I would love to hear a slow-jam R&B-style cover of “Commandante,” which is chock full of the best come-ons in popular music. “I’m going to plant root vegetables out in the backyard / and come summer I am going to treat you right.” Someone make this happen.
Yeah, there’s a lot of Mountain Goats stuff on Pretty Fakes:
The Now-Legendary Baton Rouge Halloween Mountain Goats Show
Review: Get Lonely
PF’s (already multiply revised) Mountain Goats Top 10
Mountain Goats in Baton Rouge: April 2005
Review: The Sunset Tree (“Darnielle on the Edge of Town”)
Gorjus’ MG show poster
Gorjus: “Sub-Par in the ‘90s (‘You and Your Memory’)”
OK, now watch this performance of “Going to Georgia” and you can go.
I think it’s a little guitar riff, not a synth—but it could be.
Seems like Sax has made a big come back, since League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Agents of Atlas, and Planetary have all breathed new life into obvious successors (Planetary’s Anna Hark) or thinly-veiled Fu Manchu homages (Golden Claw and the “Asian Doctor” of LOEG vol. I).
I dig this song, yo.
Yeah, so, any worries I had about the production are gone. Review to come soon . . .