Born to Be Baaad: Mountain Goats

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ASK JOHN DARNIELLE for a list of storytellers with enviable chops and he'll drop a few expected names: "Oh, all the old legends, my standbys: Faulkner, you know, Joan Didion, Tolstoy…"

And maybe your attention drifts off for a minute.

Then it's snapped back by the end of the list:

"… and Willie D. or Scarface — whichever Geto Boy writes most of the lyrics. Every Geto Boys album is like a little miracle of storytelling, the narratives bump right by and sound like they were just coming out naturally when, if you look harder at them, they're really meticulously crafted."

Darnielle knows craft.

He's not only the man behind prolific indie-rock yarn-spinners the Mountain Goats. He also published the zine Last Plane to Jakarta for years (now in blog form), in which a certain subset of overschooled musical omnivores wax semiotic on curious specimens from the far reaches of popular culture.

In a word, he's a nerd. Who happens to make sad, brilliant, literate records.

Last year's "Get Lonely" capped a run of 15 full-lengths since 1991, plus scores of compilation appearances for the Mountain Goats. It's an astonishing body of wry, often-heartbreaking stories served up in short, simple, affecting songs structures, most from earlier years recorded on a boombox.

Darnielle's 2002 signing to 4AD allowed higher production values, but function still trumps form. The forthcoming album, still underway, features Mountain Goats regulars Peter Hughes, Franklin Bruno and Jon Wurster. Plus guitar from Annie Clark, aka St. Vincent, vocals from Bright Mountain Choir and production by John Vanderslice.

"It's a good deal more uptempo than the last one," Darnielle allows, "though it'd be hard to not be more uptempo than the last one."

Which, as a postmortem of a lost romance, got a tad dark

"There seem to be more words for discomfort than pleasure," Darnielle says. "Only a few ways to say 'this rules' but infinite ways to say 'this feels like a searing iron applied to the sole of my foot.'"

See, for instance, the glut of emo and metal.

"I listen to death metal and black metal and goregrind, and there's a sleight-of-hand going on there: The impetus may be related to this or that emotion, but the process is pure craft. Of necessity."

In short, the opposite of the Mountain Goats.

"If you're just rocking a 1/4/5, you can get out of your head a little because your hands will already know what they're doing."

But Darnielle prefers not to think too much about his process, or his prospects. His success has already wildly outstripped his expectations.

"You can't wash a dish if you're thinking, 'How now shall I wash this dish?' You gotta just put the damned thing in the soapy water and get on with it, right?"

» Black Cat, 1811 14th St. NW; with Bowerbirds, Thu., 8 p.m., $14; 202-397-7328. (U St.-Cardozo)

Written by Express contributor Bob Massey

Photos by Mark Van S