The Mountain Goats

Change is progress, some would argue, but sometimes the essentials don’t need to be fixed. John Darnielle’s “Heretic Pride” is his fifteenth full album under the name of the Mountain Goats, and it finds the singer-songwriter eager to explore the same ups and downs of domestic living in a way that artfully captures truth.

If you closely study the structural skeletons of Darnielle’s songs, you can hear the echoes of a decade’s worth of Mountain Goats tracks. But instead of the intimate string arrangements and piano parts which now accompany Darnielle’s acoustic guitar, the production values of older albums were quite different. Most of Darnielle’s back catalog finds him alone, strumming his guitar furiously, his voice passionate and raw. The tracks were frequently accompanied by an overwhelming low-fidelity hiss, courtesy of the cheap Panasonic boom box with which Darnielle recorded for years.

This is not to say that the aesthetic change is an abrupt one; Darnielle’s conversion from lo-fi god to studio craftsman began with 2002’s “Tallahassee,” which dispatched with the distinctive fuzz and grainy vocals completely. The switch to the studio ultimately proved that Darnielle’s songs didn’t rely on a gimmick, and could stand up in a high-fidelity context.

On “Heretic Pride,” the studio flourishes and Darnielle’s songwriting are better integrated than ever. In “San Bernadino,” for instance, an elegant string section provides the only instrumentation. It’s one of the album’s highlights, contrasting long, plaintive swells against the pizzicato current that gives the track its backbone. It’s not the first time Darnielle has attempted such a project in the studio, but it may be the most convincing. The song is intimate yet grand, and Darnielle’s voice soars over it, nasal and vulnerable as ever.

Perhaps even more representative of Darnielle’s increased comfort with the studio setting are the songs in which his guitar is still present. “Tianchi Lake,” for instance, is anchored by insistent guitar strumming, but a piano laced with reverb floats over the top, giving the song an important new layer of texture. “Lovecraft in Brooklyn” is another good example of how much Darnielle’s style has evolved: whereas in previous albums various other instruments would be thrown in to create the illusion of a studio band, here every element is used to its fullest potential. The song’s focal point is a distorted electric guitar part that approaches heaviness, but the rest of the track is filled out with nuances, from whining violins that swoop over the energetic drumbeat to pick-scrapes and harmonics. The studio allows Darnielle to explore rock music in all its glorious, messy details.

Of course, all the emotional hallmarks that make a Mountain Goats song recognizable are intact. In “Autoclave,” Darnielle’s predictable refrain is “my heart’s an autoclave,” a metaphor that gives the listener a pretty good idea of its writer’s ethos. Anyone willing to begin a phrase with “my heart is a” must be willing to dig wholeheartedly into the center of melodrama. However, the metaphor is ultimately destined for the unglamorous autoclave, used to boil and pressurize liquids in order to make them sterile. Even then, there’s something more to the way Darnielle sings the words with a voice that’s clearly still untrained and that’s honest enough to point to an understanding of the universality of melodrama.

In many ways, it seems obvious that Darnielle knows what makes his albums work: a hybrid of the mundane and the openly emotive. No matter the accompaniment, something beneath the sonic exterior of “Heretic Pride” clearly understands emotions in a highly personal way and knows how to convey them beautifully to the listener.