If you pick up one new band this year, make it The Mountain Goats.  Two of the best albums I own are  The Sunset Tree and Heretic Pride.  Actually, The Mountain Goats is basically a one-man operation.  Singer-songwriter John Darnielle is The Mountain Goats (similar to how Conor Oberst is Bright Eyes and Guided By Voices is Robert Pollard).

Darnielle has a classic indie rock voice — reedy, nasal, struggling a bit.  Honestly, when he gets emphatic, I worry he might pull a muscle.  This is not about vocal range for sure — the man is never going to hit a money note.  But every song he sings reeks of emotional honesty.  Listening to his lyrics and his delivery of them could send you into a serious depression, which may explain part of why The Mountain Goats have not risen above cult status.

But before I go into those lyrics, let’s talk about the music.  This is catchy indie pop at its best.  One listen of these albums and you’ll be humming the tunes all day.  Autoclave from Heretic Pride is one of the best pop songs ever written.  Or listen to the hook on Dance Music on The Sunset Tree, with the strumming guitar punctuated by piano, and tell me that’s not radio worthy.  Although many of the songs are percussion-free, Darnielle also knows how to use a drum kit (which I appreciate as a former truly mediocre drummer).  It may not seem like much, but the opening of This Year (again from The Sunset Tree) with its crisp rim shots are a great example of how Darnielle mixes in the drums to drive you through his songs.  Look, the man can do upbeat rock and then turn around with a song like Marduk T-Shirt Men’s Room Incident (Heretic Pride) that breaks your heart with gorgeous backing vocals and soaring strings.

So what I’m saying is that you can enjoy The Mountain Goats without ever listening to the lyrics.  I’m not going to mince words - what Darnielle is singing about can be rough going.  Almost of all of the songs are first person.  I have no idea how autobiographical they are, but they sure feel that way.  The Sunset Tree borders on being a concept album about a kid living through his misspent youth as the product of a broken home.  Heretic Pride feels like a collection of songs told by that same kid struggling with adulthood.  And it is a struggle, as he sings in This Year — “I’m going to make it through this year if it kills me.”

The incredibly danceable Dance Music includes this verse:

I’m in the living room watching the watergate hearings
while my step father yells at my mother.
launches a glass across the room, straight at her head
and I dash upstairs to take cover.
lean in close to my little record player on the floor.
so this is what the volume knobs for.
I listen to dance music.

Also on The Sunset Tree is a song entitled Lion’s Teeth, which seems to be about a kid trying and failing to strangle his abusive stepfather after finding him passed out in his car.  The lyrics are unsettling and beautifully written:

The king of the jungle
was asleep in his car.
When your chances fall in your lap like that,
you gotta recognize them for what they really are.
Nobody in this house wants to own up to the truth.
I crawl in shotgun and reach into his mouth
and grab hold of one long, sharp tooth
and hold on.
For dear life, I hold on.

What makes Darnielle’s work so amazing is that I have layered on an entire backstory from the lyrics that is suggested but not elaborated.  In writerspeak, we’ve got a classic example of “show, don’t tell” in action.  I’d love to see Darnielle write a novel.

But I digress.  And since I do, I might as well digress some more.  Great music, great lyrics.  But occassionally the song titles baffle me (or more precisely force me to do extensive web searches).  Dinu Lipatti’s Bones — come on now.  Even after I dig up that Lipatti was a Romanian pianist and composer who died young, I’m still confused.  Or Hast Thou Considered The Tetrapod.  Um, no, I haven’t.  (And I’m actually annoyed when I look it up and find out a tetrapod is just any vertabrate with four legs.)  And finally, Dilaudid (which turns out to be a painkiller) — couldn’t he find a more accessible name for this gut-wrenching love/lust song.

OK, consider the occasional odd song title my one quibble with The Mountain Goats.  Now go pick up The Sunset Tree and Heretic Pride.  You can thank me later.