Mountain Goats | "All Eternals Deck" | Album Review

Story by Jacob Zlomke 

| Published Mar 14, 2011

The Mountain Goats have released a staggering 18 albums in 17 years, not including the numerous side projects of the three members. To say the least, they keep busy. And All Eternals Deck is just as much its own album as the other 16.

Singer/songwriter John Darnielle has been at it so long that it’s hard to say the Mountain Goats sound like anything else. Mountain Goats albums are influencing Mountain Goats albums. While retaining its own identity, All Eternals Deck hails Get Lonely, Tallahassee and even his last lo-fi attempt, All Hail West Texas.

The reason this album maintains its own identity amidst some tough competition, and while drawing elements from the best of the Mountain Goats, is all in Darnielle’s attitude. He’s been desperate, he’s been sad, he’s been abused and heartbroken and addicted, depraved and ecstatic. Now it seems like he may just be comfortable.

Yes, he sounded comfortable on 2009’s Life of the World to Come, but that comfort slipped into mellow, which, in turn, slipped into placid complacency. On the latest, there is an energy brimming just beneath the surface of the album, bubbling over, but just barely, and only for brief moments, on tracks like “Damn These Vampires,” and “Beautiful Gas Mask.” Lyrically, John Darnielle is just as reliable as ever, composing lyrics like a novelist or 60s-era poet.

All Eternals Deck is probably not the Mountain Goats’ masterpiece—that moment passed with a slew of albums in the mid-2000s. But it’s certainly the Mountain Goats at their most adept. Looking at the previous 16 albums, number 17 makes a lot of sense right now, if nothing else.