After hearing The Sunset Tree, I was certain that John Darnielle was incapable of writing songs that even hint at happiness. Hope is abundant, but joy is absent. His songs are stories of lives endured. Each album is an anthology of damaged characters trying to survive unfortunate circumstances. Heretic Pride makes that leap from hope to joy, the overall mood being bright, glimmering with bliss amid an overcast stage. The company, a band of pariahs and tangled souls, understand their social stations but still smile as life itself, both being and creation, is worthy of celebration.
The beauties of these songs lie in their subtext. The story arc is strong, but it's those subtle details that make Heretic Pride, or any Mountain Goats album, so precious. They give each track such rich depth and characterization that the few lyrics are enough to tell story in full. Like Raymond Carver and Amy Hempel, Darnielle proves that by saying little, you can say everything.
In "Marduk T-shirt Men's Room Incident" the single idea that the subject is wearing a Marduk (a Swedish black metal band) t-shirt characterizes her, changing the entire mood of the song. Being a "Refugee from a disco in old east Berlin" this girl is clearly a rare breed, existing as part of a subculture. Knowing this, we treat her differently, with greater care, thinking of her as an "ugly duckling" outcast from her peers but, with black makeup around the eyes, she is a swan. This notion coupled with the string sections and a higher pitch than normal for Darnielle, makes for a delicate song that must be absorbed with the same gentle care it took to create it.
In "San Bernardino" the details are essential to see the story is about a couple traveling to a San Bernardino hotel to give birth to their son via water birth. Read closely the moment becomes holy as a trinity (Father, Son, and Mary) is completed. And the father celebrates the event, stating "I pulled pedal from my pockets/ I loved you so much just then," bringing his love to a higher echelon, achieved only by the creation of life.
While the lyrics return to fictional narratives, a style absent from the last three albums, the production and composition on Heretic Pride continues to drift further away from the strikingly under produced boom box recordings of their earlier days. The songs are the most varied yet. There are still acoustic pop-folk songs a plenty, but even more magnificent than they is how seamlessly the other songs, each a very different style, are interwoven. "San Bernardino," perhaps the most immaculate track on the entire album, is a very traditional ballad with little guitar and a layered string section. "New Zion" has jazzy a sound with organs providing most of the melody. While the instrumentation and form of these songs is varied, the most surprising is "Lovecraft in Brooklyn" a hands-down rock song with slightly distorted guitars, feedback, and mid-tempo drumming to keep the pace moving.
While the emphasis of The Mountain Goats' work has always been on the lyrics, the music itself should not be shunned for it's as prodigious as the heretics told of in these songs.
