The Mountain Goats: Heretic Pride

John Darnielle hasn't been gifted with a great

voice or a particularly notable ear for melody; his strength is words, which he

crafts with the flair of a novelist and the intensely personal touch of a

committed diarist. Darnielle poured himself into the last two Mountain Goats

albums, 2005's The Sunset Tree and 2006's Get Lonely, offering emotionally

overpowering accounts of, respectively, growing up with an abusive stepfather

and picking up the pieces of his life after a failed romantic relationship. Where

those records were like novellas, Heretic Pride is a collection of short

stories with nothing connecting them except Darnielle's nasal delivery and

driving acoustic guitar. Without the gripping autobiographical elements of

recent Mountain Goats releases (or the tape hiss of the band's lo-fi days) to

justify them, Darnielle's idiosyncratic, occasionally annoying vocals and

elementary folk melodies fall a little flat. As a collection of words, Heretic

is great:

Richly detailed songs like "Lovecraft In Brooklyn" (packed with potent visual

references like "some kid in a Marcus Allen jersey asking me for a cigarette")

and "Sept. 15 1983" (a remembrance of '70s reggae singer Prince Far I) play

amazingly well on paper, but they could use a stronger interpreter at the

microphone.