Some of the most beloved Mountain Goats songs are the desperate, defiant ones, where everything is in the process of collapse. The lo-fi sound of John Darnielle’s earliest records embodied the same emotional overspill as the lyrics, but starting with 2003’s Tallahassee, Darnielle explored more ornate production in service of the same raw feelings. By the time of 2017’s Goths, the band’s sound had become adventurous enough to ditch the acoustic guitar entirely, dropping rough-around-the-edges characters into smooth, accomplished arrangements ostensibly at odds with—but obliquely perfect for—their sensibilities.
Darnielle started writing the latest Mountain Goats record, Days, as an attempt to do for 1990s grunge culture what Goths did for the Docs and eyeliner crowds of the ’80s—a redistributive history, bestowing attention on the unfairly forgotten. There’s still a bit of that on the final product, but the writing expanded beyond any particular scene or era. Where Goths has its jaunty song about being “Paid in Cocaine,” Days has “Woodstock,” a lush song in which we watch a young man “yell about cocaine/shirtless before God.” Like that ’90s Woodstock revival, Days is more of an extension than a sequel; it drops plenty of small names, yes, but it’s also drolly sympathetic to the cruelties of commercial success. There’s also a consistent eye to what a camera can and can’t capture—half of the songs mention some sort of footage, and the rest are explicit epitaphs.
No score yet, be the first to add.
In addition to being heartbreaking and profound, Darnielle’s lyrics have always been very funny, and Days extends this sensibility to the music. “Song for Layne Staley” starts by evoking the sound of Darnielle’s earliest albums—crackled acoustic guitar, lyrics delivered in staccato bursts—but then undercuts itself with tremolo, then Jon Wurster’s drums and Rob Jost’s bass, and, suddenly, he’s singing about the late Alice in Chains frontman, on TV in “designer shades.” It’s a short song, but there’s a whole life inside, traced from youthful boredom to mainstream success and down into doom. It lands its kicker with the help of deft instrumentation and an anthemic build—somehow, you beat the odds and make it to the top, only to discover, “nationwide, live on the air,” that you don’t want what you fought so hard to get.
Goths brought out the subculture’s sensitive side with a sunny, straight-faced musical costume but there are moments on Days when the ceremonial dress seems more befitting of a seance, like the way “Candlebox” resurrects the soaring arcs of radio-rock power balladry in order to sob beneath them. Not everything clicks: Some refrains get repeated one-too-many times, sometimes the arrangements linger in the unsatisfying middle between sharp understatement and playful experiment. “Last Day” has some wacky touches, but the lyrics lack the detail Darnielle is so good at, and though it works on a conceptual level—a closing song about revelations that never quite arrive—it fails to achieve either the climactic payoff or graceful relief found in his discography’s more distinctive farewells.
