You have to hand it to a guy—that it being an ADD diagnosis—which sets you to write a concept album about fantasy board games only to end up with an album that includes songs about Ozzy Osbourne, Waylon Jennings, and major league baseball pitching great Doc Gooden. Last I checked you won’t find Gooden playing goat ball. As for Ozzy, he’d have eaten the goat.
The guy responsible for 2019’s In League with Dragons is the Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle, whose novelist’s eye (he’s written four of them) and empathy for his creations make him perhaps the finest songwriter of our time. His precision-tooled lyrics haven’t changed much since his 1994 debut Zopilote Machine. His music, on the other hand, his evolved from frenetic one-man solo guitar workouts to a more mature but no less moving chamber pop. Plenty, including me, miss the hyperactive Darnielle of old, but there’s much to be said for the Mountain Goats’ more filled-out sound.
“Done Bleeding” is a piano-driven shuffle, but unlike most Mountain Goats songs I can’t tell you what it’s about. What I do like are lines like “List alphabetically/The toxins the doctors found in me/During my time in prison,” and “Grim faced pilots back from the bombing run/When I get done.” “Younger” mines similar musical territory (and boasts a great saxophone solo) and its lyrics are as cryptic as “Done Bleeding,” although I can’t help but believe the song’s closing lines hold its key: “It never hurts to give thanks to the navigator/Even when he’s spitting out random numbers/I knew what those figures meant/And what they hoped to represent/When I was younger.”
“Passaic 75″ is told in the first person by Ozzy Osbourne, who’s not sounding in the best of shape (“renew my assault on my lungs and my liver”) but has a message to the world: “Tell the person next to you/I want everyone to get high/Tell you boss/tell your mother/I want everyone to get high.” It’s every bit as good an “everybody join in” song as “Going Invisible 2,” with its repeated lines “I’m gonna burn it down today/Down today okay/Sweep all the ashes today.” Darnielle has always had a knack for the revenge song; take 2005’s “Up the Wolves,” where he sings, “I’m gonna get myself in fighting trim/Scope out every angle of unfair advantage/I’m gonna bribe the officials, I’m gonna kill all the judges/I’m gonna take you people years to recover from all of the damage.”
“Doc Gooden” is told from the point of view of the great MLB pitcher himself, who dominated the game for years before drug and alcohol addiction hastened his downfall and ultimately landed him in prison. The song begins with a brief account of the glory years (“They sent their best and brightest to me/I sent them all back down”) and ends in bitterness when everybody knew his name for all the wrong reasons (“When my name was everywhere/None of you were there/When my name was everywhere”).
“Waylon Jennings Live!“ is told from the point of view of an outlaw not of the country sort, although he gives old Waylon a tip of the hat as he watches him sing at the Meskwaki casino in Tarni, Iowa (“Looking up at the one man in this room/Who’s handled more cocaine than me”). Our narrator is on the run and as prepared as a good Boy Scouts—the dirt brown suitcase in the trunk of his rented Mitsubishi is “full of firearms and flash drives/Full of passports/And international money orders/For just in case I make it cross the border.”
“Clemency for the Wizard King” has a Paul Simon vibe (I know, but don’t be scared) and concerns an intrepid band come to rescue their king—things don’t get much more Dungeons and Dragons than that. Darnielle opens “In League with Dragons”—which picks up the tempo and even comes complete with a pedal steel guitar—with the lines “It’s so hard to get revenge/The human element gets you down.” But his revenge is anything but human: “Make it real, make a deal/Until my protector comes/Huge wings blotting out the sun/Remembering everyone.”
“Cadaver Sniffing Dog” has nifty acceleration and an electric guitar solo; that said, I can’t help but wonder why Darnielle has his cadaver sniffing dogs at domestic crime scene—their job is to locate the missing dead, not to stand around drinking coffee while gawking at them. “An Antidote for Strychnine” tells the story of a scientist at his empty work trying to find/a cure for strychnine. ” He sings, “Only share my research/With sick lab rats like me/Trapped behind the beakers/And the Erlenmeyer flasks/Cut off from the world, I may not ever get free.” The lab animals aren’t the only ones in cages in this song.
“Possum by Night” has a sad, lounge piano feel to it, and is surprisingly touching—“Try not to get stuck in the intake vent,” Darnielle sings, then “Grow fat, and grow old, and go blind, and be content.”And he ends the song with the lines, “Once more unto the breach/Safe in the spots that the light can’t reach.” On LP closer “Sicilian Crest,” Darnielle sings in a more conventional matter—although I’d have a hard time time telling you what that means. Darnielle has called “Sicilian Crest” a “song which tries to understand the mindset that welcomes incipient fascism,” and it opens on an ominous note with the lines “In these times of wanting prophecy/And false witnesses up to all manner of deviltry/Drench a kitchen rag in heretics blood/Wash your windows and prepare for the flood.” And premonitions of violence run like blood through the veins of the lines “Hope for the best/Prepare for the worst/We wait like stockpiled land mines/Ready to burst.”
John Darnielle is the best singer-songwriter of our day, in large part because he has the gifts of an excellent prose writer, the concision necessary to distill his language to the song form, and the empathy we all need more of. The man cares about his subjects; they may be angry or desperate but they all partake of the divine. In his song “Against Pollution” he sings, “When the last days come/We shall see visions/More vivid than sunsets/And brighter than stars/And we will recognize each other/As if for the first time/The way we really are.” Those are the lines of a mystic, or a man who sees beyond the limits of plain sight our inner, and better selves, and we need more of his likes.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
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