The Gospel According to Prisco

Holy crap, do I love me some John Darnielle.  While there’s a lot to be said of the charm of the early Mountain Goats recordings, done with pops and hisses in an almost guerilla release format, the later stuff just gets epic.  The swelling strings, the haunting poetry of the lyrics, the simple enjoyment I get from each album.  Heretic Pride doesn’t have any stand out songs for me like the last few releases, but overall, it’s a strong, strong album.  I know I’m going to have this one on constant loop for a while, just because I love that nasally voice so much.  It reminds me of weird friends I had in high school who probably were on mad amounts of drugs, who would write in composition books and speak in rhymes.  Just words that had no meaning to me at the time, but sounded so fucking cool. 

It’s pretty impossible for Darnielle to improve on The Sunset Tree, because that was such a personal album about abusive childhood, but Heretic Pride, to me anyway, is a much more comprehensively better overall record than Get Lonely.  But like Ween, it’s difficult for me to point out a favorite album.  It’s all good, always good, even when it’s insanely bad or crazy.