As The Mountain Goats show started, I was struck by the complete 180 that leader John Darnielle has engineered over the years. After his three backing band members took their positions and “Overture” blended into “Armies of the Lord,” Darnielle sauntered over to the mic and began singing. The lush keyboards and half-measured/half-frenetic drumming of Jon Wurster propelled “Armies of the Lord” and there was no guitar in sight. This was a far cry from the beginnings of The Mountain Goats, which was pretty much just Darnielle and an acoustic guitar, augmented a bit later on with Rachel Ware providing vocals and bass.
Of course, today’s band is a lot different from the one who put out records on Shrimper, Ajax and Emperor Jones, and the inflection point is probably somewhere around 2002 when Tallahassee came out, leaving the lo-fi world and stepping into a more technicolor palette. That was seventeen years ago, a testament to his work ethic and proficiency. Though the songs most played tonight were from last year’s Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan, he did drop a couple of new ones into tonight’s performance, with Days slated to be released later this year, and encouraged everyone to yell out for “Shallow Grave” at the next show. (I won’t spoil the ins and outs of “Charlie Sheen Reaches Out To The Feds.”)
The constants are Darnielle’s half-spoken/half-sung vocal delivery, and his incredible skill of using words to paint a picture and tell a story. “You have time for a long, rambling story? If you don’t have time for that you should go home and come back in the morning and I’ll still be talking.” He noted that most bands don’t even sing one song about bandages and he gave us two (“Need More Bandages” and “Your Bandage”).
He also noted that Columbus was the first place that wasn’t on the West Coast that he played, a New Years Day show at Stache’s in 1994, and reaching back to the solo days he played a trio of songs by himself, the stirring “Coroner’s Gambit” leading the way and closing with “The Last Limit of Bhakti” albeit with no banjo like on the recorded version. For people who might catch multiple shows of this tour, this solo part is where night to night song choice is pretty fluid.
The crowd had a small but annoying contingent of chatters and I moved around the edges of the sold out room a few times to find a spot where I could just concentrate on the music and not what someone had for lunch. As the encore wound down, that subsided and “Up The Wolves” and “No Children” brought the show to a thunderous close. Has there ever been a sunnier song that is a lynchpin of a band’s catalog with completely dark lyrics like “No Children”? It’s a strange juxtaposition but it works.
