Title: The Mountain Goats: Goths Album Review | Pitchfork
Headings: Goths
The Mountain Goats
Goths
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Content: Goths sounds nothing like goth rock, but maybe, Darnielle seems to suggest, every goth rocker is destined to write their own bookish, soft-rock opus about nights doing cocaine while listening to Bauhaus. For indeed, the life of a goth all starts out great. After a jaunty, baroque tune about the lead singer of Sisters of Mercy packing it in and moving back to his punk roots in Leeds, the lens shifts to the West Coast of America, trying to understand how goth rock works in California thousands of miles away from Batcave, the London nightclub at the center of the UK scene. Darnielle takes us to the Los Angeles suburb of West Covina where, on “Stench of the Unburied,” a young vamp cruises the highways in a Pontiac Grand Am, drunk and alive, seeing visions of his car going up in flames, all while listening to KROQ play Siouxsie and the Banshees. The prime years of the young goth culminate with “Wear Black,” a gorgeous hymn for the timeless language of black, a sigil of goths worldwide. No matter what happens, Darnielle sings, one must wear black in the light, in the dark, in the present tense, or in my absence. On the back half of the album, the fast life of a goth becomes untenable. Our singer is older now, playing shows to no one on the Sunset Strip, ostracized and broken, recalling how they were once paid in cocaine (“Paid in Cocaine”) and now refusing to open for Trent Reznor (“Shelved”). Darnielle adds more and more space to the songs, slows down his delivery as if it is almost too difficult to admit that “the ride’s over.” By the quiet end, he’s almost thankful for his grim middle-aged fate, “hauling these songs to the light from the mouth of the grave” playing “really big festivals every other summer in Brazil” (“For the Portuguese Goth Metal Bands”).