The Mountain Goats: All Eternals Deck (a record review)
It’s a special sort of gift that my favorite songwriter is still making good music, let alone some of the best of his career, into his second decade of songwriting. Have you heard a Prince album lately? Sure, I can go back and listen to Dirty Mind whenever I want to, but I have to be contented with one or two good songs an album nowadays… not so with the Mountain Goats, who have just released one of the best albums of his/their career with All Eternals Deck.
The high water mark of John Darnielle’s songwriting is pretty damn high – it’s pretty hard to find a weak spot in his post-Coroner’s Gambit catalog. But where the past couple Mountain Goats records have had their flaws – Heretic Pride alternated nicely between strident and reflective, but had a bit too much of the latter and not quite enough of the former, and The Life of the World to Come is deep, rich, and rewarding but a little bit of a slog when taken at full length – All Eternals Deck finds a brilliant and beautiful middle ground between the lurking dread and power of Heretic Pride and the pervading sorrow and experimental instrumentation threaded throughout Get Lonely (a personal favorite, admittedly).
In doing so, it pulls back from the intensely personal, and generally romantic, themes of Get Lonely to find other common ground in our shared experience, and where Heretic Pride was concerned with telling stories of particular demons, outcasts, and other misfits, AED trades in showing us the ones inside ourselves. But I’m making it all sound very pretentious, and despite his lyrical acumen and tendency towards metaphor and allegory, Darnielle is anything but pretentious – he’s a storyteller for the common man, the guy who wants to tell you that even though you just ran out of drugs and your girl/boyfriend left you and the cops are probably coming and we’re all gonna die someday, it’s going to be ok. I think in a lot of ways, all of his records are about that – this one just happens to distill that essence down to its purest form, in 13 perfect songs filled with dread and sorrow and hope.
Those who know me might say that I am predisposed to think anything Darnielle is great, and they wouldn’t be wrong, but I’d point you to this site’s best-of archive and point out that at no point do I have any MG record ranked higher than #7 on my lists (although Get Lonely deserves a post-evaluation bump. But still). However, this one is a masterpiece – it’s everything he does as best as it can be done (so far), and although I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s better than Tallahassee, it certainly deserves to be considered in that company.
I shared one of its songs here, but it really deserves to be listened to as a whole, hopefully in a dark room where you’re alone and wondering what’s going to happen next. The answer, as the Mountain Goats will be glad to tell you, is that you’re going to die eventually. But there will be detours along the way.
