Send "The Mountain Goats " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Dustedmagazine |
 The evidence is circumstantial, but palpable — Mountain Goats leader John Darnielle reads Dusted. Our review of the last proper Mountain Goats record, Heretic Pride, characterized the uncharacteristically overpowering drumming on the last track as sounding like they were appropriated from some Steve Albini recording. This time he’s hired Albini’s studio Electrical Audio, although not Albini himself, to obtain the big but un-processed sound that surrounds his songs. It’s unclear if he took Dusted scribe Charlie Wilmoth’s chief criticism to heart, but one of this record’s charms is its relative success in confronting one of the Mountain Goats’ most enduring dilemmas since Darnielle stopped recording his songs on a boombox – how to make the music as interesting as the words? That said, Darnielle seems to have heavier things on his mind than what instruments to use and where to apply the compression. Every song on The Life of the World to Come is named after a Bible verse, which reflects one of the places he has turned for solace and guidance while dealing with issues instantly relatable to anyone who’s lived long enough — ill health, the undying memory of your past mistakes, and the passing of the people you most love. Potentially fertile material, but how to keep it from turning mawkish? One option is sheer craft. “Matthew 25:21” delivers a lyric that captures the impotence one feels when watching someone die of cancer just as vividly as the tightly constructed short fictions he used to write in the 90s about bad debts and mummified Vikings. But other songs, while solid, don’t hit you as fast and hard as his pithily related scenarios of yore. On these, Darnielle implements solutions that should be familiar to anyone who recognizes faith as something you wrestle with rather than pot and keep in place forevermore. He allows for skepticism on “Romans 10:9,” seeming sympathetic to its protagonist’s hope that God will keep things from falling apart, but not necessarily share his faith. But he also brings charity, granting the crystal healer in "1 Samuel 15:23" purity of intent instead of going the easy route and painting him in snake oil....full text |
| Theskinny |
| Few albums will send you rifling through a 2,400 page tome. But such is the gravity, beauty and heartbreaking sentiment within The Life Of The World To Come – a trip to the Bible seems obligatory. Each song is named after a biblical passage, the relevance more obvious in some than others. Occasionally, John Darnielle adopts a persona (a prisoner on 1 John 4:16), but it mostly seems unflinchingly autobiographical with consistently breathtaking results. Matthew 25:21 is a harrowing account of rushing to someone’s bedside to watch them die: “the last of something bright burning, still burning; beyond the cancer and the chemotherapy.” Darnielle's voice comes as close as it ever will to wobbling on a track that will well up the eyes of the most secular listener. Whether you agree with the author's piousness – affected or genuine – shouldn’t stop you from hearing this. Christian rock this is not, but it's one of the stand-out folk-rock records of 2009....full text |
| Prefixmag |
| You couldn't be blamed for assuming that John Darnielle finally ran out of steam and, with no other career options available, simply opened up the Bible and started using random passages as lyrics. After all, this is his sixteenth album under the Mountain Goats name, and the track list consisting of Bible verses suggests either a creative roadblock or some sort of religious calling to convert the masses of argyle-wearing hipster types. In reality, though, The Life of the World to Come is based on Darnielle's life, using the Bible as a sort of narrative framework. On the Mountain Goats' website, he describes it as "twelve new songs: twelve hard lessons the Bible taught me, kind of." The Mountain Goats this time around consists of Darnielle, Jon Wurster, and Peter Hughes, with some string arrangements from Final Fantasy's Owen Pallett....full text |
The Mountain Goats lyrics
