The Mountain Goats have always been shapeshifters. From John Darnielle sitting alone with his guitar to the increasingly eclectic orchestration of their later work, it’s hard to even pin down a genre. Their last album, Jenny From Thebes, flirted with being a rock opera, but that flirtation is consummated in Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan. The album opens with a stirring overture that feels plucked from Broadway, although perhaps the ultimate proof is the presence of Lin-Manuel Miranda on a handful of numbers.
Told by the survivors of a shipwreck, this story is a meditation on how we face the inevitability of death. Whilst some songs are tender, like the gentle ministrations of ‘Peru’, or the elegiac ‘Your Glow’, they are surprisingly upbeat for the mortal thoughts of three men dying from wounds and starvation. Even a track like ‘Cold at Night’, where our protagonists begin to realise their time is running out, is more resolute than fatalistic.
Perhaps the closest to a classic Mountain Goats song is the acoustic-guitar-heavy ‘Rocks in My Pockets’, in which the unnamed narrator contemplates what it will mean to be the last one standing, telling us ‘The weak ones get lucky; the strong ones stick around to see the end’.
Multi-instrumentalist Matt Douglas serves as producer for the first time. His addition to the band in 2015 marked the beginning of their biggest change since Darnielle stopped recording on a boombox. Here, he has created the most musically varied and accomplished Mountain Goats album to date. This is a production rippling with strings, woodwinds and harps, creating an airy feel that offsets the darkness of the concept.
The standard guitar/bass/drum combination of previous Mountain Goats albums still lies at the heart of the sound, but even that goes in new directions. ‘Dawn of Revelation’, for example, explodes into an acid rock guitar solo that feels like a lost artefact from the early seventies. At the other end of the scale, the seductive lounge jazz of ‘Lady From Shanghai 2’ slowly winds us down before the album’s final number.
Darnielle’s lyrics are as charged as ever. Whilst these songs are dense with Biblical allusions and sly literary references, they carry the emotional intensity that is his trademark. Death and ageing have been regular themes in more recent Mountain Goats albums, and Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan takes them to new levels. The shifting perspectives of the three survivors present all the stages of grief, with the final track, ‘Broken to Begin With’, offering a form of bittersweet acceptance.
The mere fact that Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan is a musical will be divisive for long-time fans, and this format may make the lyrics feel less personal than those which made The Mountain Goats’ reputation, but ultimately this is a sparkling, exciting and oddly daring album for a band who have been around for over 30 years.
The Mountain Goats
Through This Fire Across from Peter Balkan
Released: 7th November on Cadmean Dawn Records
The Mountain Goats Website
Scott Dorward is an author and editor, working in roleplaying games. he was formerly line developer for Cubicle 7’s World War Cthulhu line.
