Thoreau once wrote, “most men lead lives of quiet desperation.” The sentiment couldn’t be truer than within The Mountain Goats frontman John Darnielle’s songs, whose characters seem to have stepped straight out of the pages of a particularly devastating Raymond Carver story. But The Mountain Goats — which consist of founder Darnielle and a backing band — brought much more than run-of-the-mill literary depression on Tuesday night at Manhattan’s Webster Hall.
How then, do they (he) manage to strike such a universal chord with his stories (a more apt description than mere “songs”)? To the uninitiated, watching this (by all accounts, completely joyous) man perform songs of anguish while hopping around onstage in his socks might seem a rather striking — if not downright strange — juxtaposition. But it works, and Darnielle, within his songs, manages to get way down in the depths of his followers’ psyches, into areas they probably hadn’t explored in years. Who hasn’t dealt with a situation as a child that’s stuck with you until adulthood, or endured the end of a relationship you thought you’d never truly get over? Darnielle knows that you have, and paints characters that are frozen in time, unable to move past it. They suffer, if you will, so you don’t have to.
If that seems like a creeping religious metaphor, it’s no accident. Much of Darnielle’s music uses religion — especially Christianity — as a backdrop, and consequently the theme of redemption is an easy read. (The Goats’ latest album, The Life of the World To Come, is based entirely on verses from the Bible.) Still, the label-prone don’t refer the Goats’ disciples as members of the Church of John Darnielle for nothing: There is a very basic — yet not at all primitive — thread that runs through nearly everything he writes. But if those songs were dismissed as being solely about religion, then there’d be a big piece of the puzzle missing: Darnielle is onstage acting out the lives of the people about whom he sings — the highs, the lows, the sometimes near-hysterics — and he’s frequently playing the part of the person laughing in the face of dashed hopes. Sometimes that character just happens to be his former self, set to song, and he makes the autobiographical element clear when it’s there.
But let’s be clear about The Mountain Goats’ live presence, lest it be argued that their shows are purely about Darnielle’s theatrics and pageantry: The transition from full, raucous band with pyrotechnic-esque light effects to stripped-down, man-and-his-guitar mode was seamless enough that the audience barely noticed the change — the music itself was what transfixed the already absorbed (and for all accounts, pretty dazzled) audience.
Finally closing the set with full band back on stage, Darnielle launched into crowd favorite “This Year,” a song featuring the famous chorus “I will make it through this year if it kills me.” Maybe Thoreau didn’t quite have it right — looks like defiance can kick quiet desperation’s ass any day.
