The Mountain Goats + The Moaners - Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA; Mar. 14, 2008)

The Museum of Fine Arts is a very, very weird venue. Part high-school auditorium—with its mossy-green, conjoined seating—part symphony hall—complete with golden cherubs (plus the stifled “please-don’t-touch-that” air in the line to get in)—the MFA nonetheless pulls in excellent acts, from Yo La Tengo (last year) to Taken By Trees (last month) to Xiu Xiu (next week). And last night, they hosted The Mountain Goats. And there was much rejoicing.

But before we got to The Mountain Goats, The Moaners (MySpace page) treated us to an excellent opening set. Apparently hand-picked as marquee-mates by John Darnielle himself, The Moaners pack a strong Southern punch out of just a guitarist and a drummer (also: they’re from Chapel Hill; I’m not sure how the causality works out, but I’m thinking that being from NC is somehow related to the southernness). They started off with a solid, intense, focused sound, showing us a slow-burning focus that bloomed into much more raucous raging. Melissa Swingle’s twangy, languid voice adds a pointed, pull-off-the-pitch languor to their sound, which Laura King both complements and dispels almost immediately with her persistent, precise drumming. King plays wicked drums. Really. Her hands move fluidly, sticks dancing from tom to snare to high hat, coming at the kit with an easy intention that, combined with how much she clearly enjoys what she’s doing, makes for one of the more enjoyable drummers we’ve seen.

One of the MFA’s quirks is that the stadium seating separates the audience members from each other, both making the collective experience of the show more remote and solitary, and also encouraging absolute silence from the audience. So one can hardly blame The Moaners for being a little off-put having their tuning in between pieces completely exposed, and a lamentable lack of alcohol not helping to take the edge off the jitters. Thus, a couple of endearingly human muss-ups replete with uncomfortable banter felt perfectly natural and, not that this was necessary, but all felt perfectly forgivable. We’re looking forward, though, to seeing them rock out while feeling a little more at home at the Middle East on Saturday.

Oh! Melissa Swingle also plays the saw while Laura King plays guitar! Completely awesome, too. Though the saw shreds the horsehair from her violin bow, Swingle elicits a wispy, ghostly moan (!!) that contrasts beautifully with the “chunk-a-chunk” of King’s simply strummed guitar. ‘Twas a lovely way to finish the set.

At the top of The Mountain Goats’ set, I found myself a little disappointed. Where was the delightfully lo-fi sound that I’d come to cherish off of, say, Tallahassee or The Sunset Tree? John Darnielle sounded positively polished at the start, and I worried that what had sounded like lo-fi was actually a heavily produced sound, though in the opposite direction than one normally expects. As Darnielle warms up, or, more likely, fatigues, his voice takes on the desperate yearning that I love and expected. I figured this out by the second song, “Autoclave,” off of the brand-spanking-new Heretic Pride, a song with three verses sung in three progressively higher octaves as the song becomes more desperate and wistful.

Every single song gave us something wonderful and special, so there’s really no way to go song by song without this becoming yet another 7000-word exposition, and, frankly, I’m writing enough of those these days. So I’ll give you some things to think about from this show and then I’ll chat about others after tonight’s Middle East compliment.

First, Darnielle blathered excellent banter. Before busting into the title track from Heretic Pride (released just last month), Darnielle declared that he felt odd playing it in one of the most Catholic cities in the country. “But I’ve got the Blessed Virgin on my guitar strap,” he showed us, so if things got really bad, she could always just strike him down. “Wouldn’t that make for a special show?” Uncomfortable or not, the band whipped into “Heretic Pride,” with Darnielle dancing around, mouth open in a silent howl whenever he wasn’t singing, flailing his legs and whipping his gorgeous rock-cut acoustic guitar around with him. He really is gleefully heretical.

The Mountain Goats played several pieces from The Sunset Tree, said to be Darnielle’s only autobiographical album. Much of it is about abuse suffered at the hands of his step-father—e.g., “Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod"—and possible revenge for such acts—e.g., “Lion’s Teeth.” Even with such heavy, surely painful subject matter, we’re given poignant moments of empathy and real hope. For example, during an attack in “. . . Tetrapod,” the boy thinks about his stereo, hoping it won’t be broken, since it’s “the one thing that I couldn’t live without.” The Mountain Goats treat the song—and its album-mates—with real care, with empathy for the child, with a conspiratorial solidarity for his fantasies. While much of Darnielle’s lyricism shows an incredible knack for detail, for human depth of emotion, the songs on this album in particular demonstrate a universal vulnerability, especially that of a child, but clearly also our grown-up vulnerabilities, whatever they may be.

After eight songs with his band, the snazzily-dressed bassist and harmony-singer Peter Hughes, and rock-solid drummer Jon Wurster—who Darnielle credits as being largely responsible for the bigger, celebratory sound on Heretic Pride—walked off, leaving Darnielle alone with his guitar. He sang us a song that he’d written just three weeks before in a hotel in Alaska, called “Sign of the Crow,” and then bemoaned his burgeoning over-confidence before breaking into a Rodney Crowell song that he’d never played before. Closing up his solo set, Darnielle warned us, “This is a love song,” and intoned the first lyrics of “So Desperate,” also off of Heretic Pride. In it, he sings of being parked in a car with someone else in their “neutral territory,” needing to say something to that someone, but being blinded and at least temporarily purified by glorious weather, and atmospheric good-tidings, though still feeling “so desperate in your arms.” As he played with his falsetto towards the end of the song, Darnielle backed off of the microphone, giving us just his simple, unadorned voice in the long, tall room. It’s extremely rare that we hear a vocalist not filtered through some kind of electricity, yielding yet one more special moment in a night full of them.

When his band came back on, Darnielle strapped on his electric, now ready to tackle the revenge fantasy “Lion’s Teeth,” with its slow, dangerous, steely-eyed triplet rhythms (q q q ttt | q q q ttt | q q q ttt | q, etc) and startling imagery. After four songs with the electric, the band said its thanks, and left the stage. House lights brightened, suggesting that The Mountain Goats hadn’t expected to play an encore, again perhaps an odd by-product of the MFA’s space. The audience, though, didn’t move, but cheered, clapped, and yelled until the band came back out, smiling and waving, and the house lights dimmed again. Continuing his banter, Darnielle prepared to present to us, “La Traviata, by Verdi.” People clapped, prompting Darnielle to suggest—in a Mitch-Hedberg-esque, halting style—that, while we thought it was funny now, wait until three hours from now, after he had tried to sing the entire opera with just Peter for assistance. Then all the people who thought it was funny would realize that really, it hadn’t been funny for the last two hours and fifty-five minutes as they had locked the back doors and determined to ram some culture down our throats. Appropriate, really, as we WERE at the Museum of Fine Arts.

The encore started off with “How to Embrace a Swamp Creature,” again off of Heretic Pride, with the refrain of “I’m out of my element, I can’t breathe.” As is often the case in Darnielle’s writing, though, even the most desperate, sputtering lyrics have some of the happiest, sunniest accompaniment of modern music, and “. . . Swamp Creature” is no exception. Really whipping the audience up, though, was the final song, a lacerating, howled “No Children,” off of Tallahassee. The entire album is about the couple from the Alpha Series, a cycle or, simply, series of songs from across The Mountain Goats entire oeuvre, all about one couple whose relationship has become functionally dysfunctional and chemically dependant. There are several sites where you can read about the couple, or at least the series (the wikipedia article is good and quick), but “No Children” is exceptional in the series as it is an impressively contradictory song. As just discussed, Darnielle has a talent for matching a woeful subject matter with peppy, happy-sounding music. Here, he sings “I hope you die! I hope we both die!” while guitar, moving with a certain choppy undercurrent befitting the lyrics, nonetheless sounds, well, happy. He made a couple of lyrical adjustments in the performance, singing “I hope if I think of you years down the line, I can’t find one good thing to say” rather than the recorded version’s “. . . you think of me . . . .” He also replaced the final “I hope we both die” with a howled “I HOPE WE ALL DIE!” eliciting, curiously, cheers from the audience. Then again, Darnielle had remarked a couple of times about the audience’s odd reactions, such as cheering when he admitted that he was about to butcher the Rodney Crowell he’d never played before. Maybe I’ll chalk that up to the venue again, but, more likely, it’s an audience wanting something that is finally, completely theirs. It doesn’t matter if an artist you adore fucks it up now and again in performance, since you’re getting a completely unique, never-to-be repeated experience. Sure, it’s not the most forgiving or generous view of an audience, but I’m open to hearing other opinions on the subject.

In any event, we’re already excited about Saturday’s show. It should be completely different, with the Middle East Down’s cramped, crowded floor and a noisier, more traditional rock-show atmosphere. I’ll catch up with you after.

Also, to the extraordinarily generous woman whose pen I so devilishly stole: if it makes you feel any better, the damn thing exploded all over my hands, and now I’ve got black ink on my face, too. So you had your revenge, even if you didn’t mean to mete it out.

Set List:
1. Marduk T-Shirt Men’s Room Incident (Darnielle on acoustic)-- Heretic Pride
2. Autoclave (acoustic)—Heretic Pride
3. New Monster Avenue (acoustic)—The Sunset Tree
4. Heretic Pride (acoustic)—Heretic Pride
5. New Zion (acoustic)—Heretic Pride
6. Wild Sage (acoustic)—Get Lonely
7. Michael Myers Resplendent (acoustic)—Heretic Pride
8. Hast Thou Considered The Tetrapod (acoustic)—The Sunset Tree
9. Jeff Davis Country Blues (solo acoustic)—All Hail West Texas
10. Sign Of The Crow (solo acoustic)—brand spankin’ new
11. I Ain’t Livin’ Long Like This (solo acoustic)—Rodney Crowell cover
12, So Desperate (solo acoustic)—Heretic Pride
13. In the Craters On The Moon (Darnielle on electric, with band again)—Heretic Pride
14. Love Love Love (electric)—The Sunset Tree
15. Lion’s Teeth (electric)—The Sunset Tree
16. Sept 15 1983—Heretic Pride

Encore:
1. How to Embrace A Swamp Creature (acoustic)—Heretic Pride
2. No Children (acoustic)—Tallahassee

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The Mountain Goats + The Moaners - The Middle East Downstairs (Cambridge, MA; Mar. 15, 2008)

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