We smell what John Darnielle is cooking on an adventurous Mountain Goats concept album
For most artists, a concept album about professional wrestling would be a cute novelty curveball, and probably a dubious artistic proposition: something to be approached with a smirk and cautiously lowered expectations. For John Darnielle, it feels no more improbable—if anything, maybe less—than, say, a song cycle chronicling depression after a breakup. Given his preoccupations with desperation, obsessiveness, emotional volatility, marginalized figures and imaginative escape-worlds, wrestlers and their fans make for readily familiar and natural Darnielle character-narrators. And the (totally unsurprising) information that the young Darnielle was a big wrestling fan himself adds an element of autobiography and underscores the sheer glee he takes in delivering lines like “I personally will stab you in the eye with a foreign object.”
So, no surprises here: These songs do exactly the kind of things that latter-day Mountain Goats songs do, and they do them obliquely, evocatively and enviably well. There are subdued, piano-driven ruminations on troubling memories (“Southwestern Territory”); furiously spluttering id-eruptions (“Choked Out,” “Werewolf Gimmick”); unlikely but biographically accurate portraits of celebrities well past their turn in the spotlight (“Luna,” “The Ballad Of Bull Ramos”); patiently chronicled juxtapositions of depravity and tenderness (“Unmasked!,” “Hair Match.”) The wrestling angle turns out to be less a gimmick than a jumping-off point, sketching the shared world these characters inhabit without scripting specific throughlines connecting them, in a set of first-person songs that are ultimately no less earnest or affecting than those on the aforementioned break-up record, albeit more given to colorful insider jargon and particularly inventive physical violence.
—K. Ross Hoffman
