{"id":41748,"date":"2009-10-22T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-10-22T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/the-life-of-the-world-to-come\/"},"modified":"2009-10-22T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2009-10-22T00:00:00","slug":"the-life-of-the-world-to-come","status":"publish","type":"review","link":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/the-life-of-the-world-to-come\/","title":{"rendered":"The Life Of The World To Come"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are few other artists who make albums as penetrating and revelatory as John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats. 2005\u2019s The Sunset Tree <\/i>was a haunting, bare-bones exploration of Darnielle\u2019s abusive childhood, while Get Lonely, <\/i>released in 2006, is one of the most excellent heartbreak albums you\u2019ll find, free of clich\u00e9s and steeped in evocative honesty. The Goats\u2019 latest, though, moves away from autobiography and towards a wider reach, aiming to make the general just as poignant as Darnielle\u2019s deeply personal lyrics. While he has always been concerned with religious themes, particularly forgiveness and redemption, on this disc, he names each of the twelve tracks after a different Bible verse, centering around the lessons he\u2019s learned.<\/o:p><\/p>\n

This is by no means a religious album, however. Darnielle is a lapsed Catholic (the group\u2019s last album was called Heretic Pride)<\/i>, and so he tends to approach the tales of the Bible as instructive stories rather than do-or-die constructs. And while The Mountain Goats\u2019 material has never been centered around crafting accessible chart-toppers, The Life Of The World To Come <\/i>is an even thornier affair; it\u2019s contemplative and stripped of the raw, seething energy of some of their earlier material, relying on spare, gentle arrangements \u2013 mostly fuzzy acoustic guitar, bass, and muted drums \u2013 and Darnielle\u2019s coiled-tight, intriguingly imperfect vocals. And somehow, the music is just as intense as when he\u2019s working his voice raw as when he\u2019s keeping it to a whisper. <\/o:p><\/p>\n

On the opening track, \u201c1 Samuel 15:23,\u201d Darnielle is backed by little more than a hushed acoustic guitar as he sings lines like, \u201cMy house will be for all people who have nowhere to go,\u201d though he sounds far more ominous than welcoming as the guitars flicker nervously behind him. Like the rest of this album\u2019s material, this song is deceptively simple, all the more jarring for its bareness, and while it won\u2019t draw you in instantly, it\u2019s tough to turn away from. <\/o:p><\/p>\n

And not all of the disc is downbeat. \u201cPsalms 40:2\u201d is a battle cry, full of jittery guitars, taut drums, and Darnielle\u2019s smoky, emotive vocals, while \u201cGenesis 3:23\u201d is warm and confident, the instrumentation more fleshed out and jangly as Darnielle channels Adam and Eve, describing breaking into the house he used to live in. As always, the images are uneasy but lovely (\u201cSit looking up at the stars outside \/ Like teeth in the mouth of a shark\u201d), undoing the very notion of what \u201chome\u201d means once you\u2019ve left it.\u00a0 <\/o:p><\/p>\n

It\u2019s stunning how Darnielle takes each verse and crafts a modern-day story around it, taking the more general lessons and making them pierce your very heart. Perhaps most evocatively, \u201cMatthew 25:21\u201d depicts Darnielle flying home from tour to be with his mother-in-law as she fades away from terminal cancer; amid a quiet haze of guitars, he imagines himself \u201can airplane tumbling wing over wing,\u201d and as the song trickles away to nothing, he sings, \u201cIt\u2019s three days later when I get the call \/ And there\u2019s nobody around to break my fall.\u201d <\/o:p><\/p>\n

For all its hushed contemplation, the album ends in forward-motion with \u201cEzekial 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace,\u201d which belies the slow, piano-based backing with its lyrics about a positively strung-out drug addict taking a hostage and driving \u201cto make Culiac\u00e1n by sunset,\u201d and even as the world explodes around him, he just keeps driving. And on their seventeenth disc, The Mountain Goats have done the same, crafting a beautiful album that is as sparse as it is rich, letting the silence speak volumes. <\/o:p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":48,"featured_media":30109,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[8237],"rating":[5617],"class_list":["post-41748","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-the-mountain-goats","rating-rating-b-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/48"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41748\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=41748"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=41748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}