With its title culled from the Nicene Creed and its song titles Bible verses, The Mountain Goats’ 17th studio full-length effort, The Life Of The World To Come, may strike the listener as single-minded in both title and scope. This is no foreign territory for John Darnielle, the man behind the band: his dense, extensive and self-referencing song cycles have become his calling card. These song cycles have been as documented as the records themselves, and include, among others, the “Going to…” series — 46 songs — and the “Alpha” series, equally expansive in scope, culminating in 2002’s Tallahassee LP.1 For our purposes, what matters is that the cycles allow Darnielle to not only keep loose the narrative but let him animate interrelated, emotionally-bound sensations through both connected and disparate character arcs.
While I know and celebrate Darnielle’s history of grand aspirations and wide interests, rumors that he and his Goats were releasing a Christian-themed album came to me as a bit of a shock. Upon first listen, however, it became clear that, like the others, this record, the follow up to 2008’s momentous Heretic Pride,2 was more art than gospel. In fact, Darnielle intimated that he took a more dispassionate, literary approach in these diaconal studies, though it’s worth noting he became entranced by some of the Bible’s lessons, for lack of a better word, which, from my vantage point, likely made a tricky endeavor. Actually, let’s let John explain it himself:
I guess the obvious question is going to be: “John, have you had some sort of religious awakening?” and while I guess lots of people might want to be coy about answering that, that’s never really been my style, so: no. It’s not like that. It’s not some heavy-narrative-distance deal either, though, and it’s not a screed. It’s twelve new songs: twelve hard lessons the Bible taught me, kind of.3
TMG devotees can correctly assume that TLOTW2C, the sort of loose concept record Darnielle has been making since 2002’s All Hail West Texas LP,4 is characterized most by a sort of tonal, thematic and atmospheric unity. Last year’s Heretic Pride, maybe his grandest endeavor, boasted new, loftier production values and more complex compositions, not to mention outright traditional orchestration of his dissonant string section.5 Following this course, Darnielle hired the classically-trained Owen Pallet, he with the violin, known to some through Fucked Up’s Hidden World and others through his solo project Final Fantasy, to work on and contribute to the record’s string arrangements.
The result is a sparser, more solemn album with tracks like “Samuel 15:23”6 and “Hebrews 11:40”7 hearkening back to material off 2006’s Get Lonely.8 His references reach even further back: “Romans 10:9”9 and “Isaiah 45:23”10 take the smooth flowing 4/4 backbeat from 2002’s “New Chevrolet In Flames,” with the former also bringing to mind a fleshed-out “The Day The Aliens Came” from Come Come To The Sunset Tree.11 “Genesis 3:23”12 sounds more in tune with “Letter From Belgium,” “Quito,” and “Against Pollution,” all off We Shall All Be Healed,13 and the phrasing shares a chromosome or two with “Autoclave” from Heretic Pride. The piano-led, jaunty “Genesis 30:3”14 and “Deuteronomy 2:10”15 invoke two other songs from Darnielle’s catalog: “Memories,” from his side project The Extra Glenns, and The Mountain Goats’ “Michael Myers Resplendent,” a cut from 2008’s Heretic Pride.
Darnielle’s vocal inflections are forceful, even at whisper-level: you can hear his subdued dejection, the low sweet melodies contrasting with the at-the-end-of-my-rope vocal intensity and the crashing, albeit gradual,16 orchestral crescendos.
The Life Of The World To Come is by no means The Mountain Goats’ magnum opus, and so may fall into obscurity among those just beginning to delve into the canon, but it more than holds its own against releases from other groups this year. It earns a respectable 2 T’s, and a place near the front of the Goats’ extensive back catalogue. Criticisms aside, we should credit Darnielle for making a series of albums and songs with few enough dips and bends that even its newest addition reasonably elicits a blind listen.
