If you’ll pardon the colloquialism, the new Mountain Goats album is
super-duper good. Like, so good it makes me giggle and squirm and play
it over and over again.
I would strongly encourage all of you to give it a spin, especially
those of you who might have been turned off by the nasal atonality of
John Darnielle’s singing voice on earlier records. Most of The Life
of the World to Come is so soft and lush that, rather than grating,
Darnielle’s everyman, non-singer’s voice is utterly charming. He even
sounds downright pretty on “Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of
Grace.”
All of this speaks to the album’s greatest virtue: its intimacy. The
record somehow seduces you into believing you may have the only copy of
it in the world, and that nothing really exists outside of you and it.
Darnielle has, overall, restrained and simplified what he does here,
but without changing it. It’s a distillation of his strengths.
It’s impossible to single out any one or two songs as standouts
because the whole thing is perfection. Keep in mind, there’s a big
self-conscious conceit here: Every track is written in response to
Bible verse, and the song titles—”Genesis 30:3,” “Isaiah 45:23,”
“Psalms 40:2″—are all derived from their textual referents. But
it’s apropos that a Mountain Goats record would interact with a
literary body in such an overt way, and concern itself with epic
myth-building on a very small scale.
This article appears in Oct 22-28, 2009.