Thursday night, I had the pleasure of watching The Mountain Goats perform at Water Street Music Hall in downtown Rochester. Though not initially an avid fan, I’ll admit I came away from the show with a greater appreciation for the band and their music.
The Goats (if I may call them that) started out as a Californian lo-fi band in the 90s, recording into a boombox and distributing their work on cassettes and 7-inch vinyls: a method that generated the particularly frenetic, grungy, aesthetic which earned them a cult following. 34 years later, a lot has changed, but that freneticism and intensity is still there.
Also, “goats” is really more like one goat. One hyped-up, fifty-eight-year-old, sort of ex-Catholic (he told us at Water Street himself) goat. That goat’s name? John Darnielle.
Darnielle has been the one constant throughout the long history of The Mountain Goats, starting out as the sole member and continuing on through 22 albums and three New York Times bestselling novels. Again, as I am not a Goater myself, this was my first impression of the man and my most resounding sentiment was, “aw, he looks like he’s happy to be here.” And he truly did! Throughout the set, Darnielle hopped around like the Pixar lamp and at one point even did a little twirl around his mic stand. Adorable!
(Unfortunately though, he does lose points because he also wiped the sweat off his face with a rag and with a wry, bashful grin tossed it to the audience. This was decidedly less adorable. Readers, your intrepid journalist that night almost gagged. It was hard to witness. Don’t say I never did anything for you.)
Ultimately, though, I have to admit my strongest point of praise for The Mountain Goats was actually the focus not being solely on Darnielle. His unique, nasally, strained voice is evocative (and another reason for the cult following of the group) and he’s clearly a talented lyricist, but the almost manic quality of his vocals often runs the risk of drowning out everything else.
Despite what people say, some bands don’t sound better live. However, despite Darnielle’s divisive tone, The Mountain Goats is not one of these bands. While recorded versions of their songs might occasionally seem grating to the listener, when performed live (with good acoustics) they feel poignant and sentimental and meld beautifully with elaborate instrumentation. Darnielle’s peculiar voice feels fuller, bolder, more real; and his skill as a pianist shines through, while drummer Jon Wurster and multi-instrumentalist Matt Douglas add their own potent energy to the band’s intrinsically passionate quality.
Douglas in particular provides instrumentals that range from saxophone to bass to flute to back-up guitar, which lent a crucial component to the soul-baring, melancholic effect of the group’s discography. The sweet, satisfying bass at the end of “New Zion” scratches an itch that no other sound can, and it’s hard to imagine a version of “Moon Over Goldsboro” that’d be anywhere near as wistful without Douglas’s clarinet threading behind lyrics like “spend all night in the company of ghosts, always wake up alone.”
Ultimately, it’s been that vulnerable and sometimes abrasive rawness that has given The Mountain Goats the kind of fanbase that get commemorative tattoos (like one man standing in front of me in the crowd), and pay 32 dollars for a shot of Hennessey or three dollars for a bottle of water, and cheer in unison through hit songs like “This Year” and “No Children.” Even for someone like me, going in with hardly any prior knowledge of the group, it was pretty much impossible not to get swept up in the buzz of a room full of strangers stubbornly swearing “you are coming down with me, hand in unlovable hand,” and “I am going to make it through this year if it kills me.”
I’m not exactly sure who we were swearing to. The universe? The band, an eight hour drive out of their way to play for us on a Thursday night in downtown Rochester? Darnielle, holding out his microphone so everyone could sing together? Everyone else in the crowd standing next to us, like when the priest tells you to shake hands with everyone, and how Darnielle told us half-ironically that “if you get yanked out you spend your whole life wanting to go back”?
I’m still deciding. But readers, I am going to make it through this year if it kills me.
