The Mountain Goats called their short fall tour “Presentiments Of Doom With A Terrific View Of The Sunset,” and that’s an apt description of the widely divergent characteristics that make John Darnielle’s longstanding project so appealing. Darnielle’s lyrics are full of “Doom”: violence and substance abuse, divorce and death, Satan and blood (so much blood!). But they also express “Terrific” joy: Mountain Goats songs are as full of resilience as they are of foreboding (perfectly encapsulated in their most famous line, “I am going to make it through this year if it kills me”). The arrangements can be lovely, sometimes sliding into a gentle soft-rock groove, but they can also be exuberant. In person, Darnielle’s a smiling, bouncing frontperson, wide-eyed and gaping with enthusiasm.
The Presentiments tour is untethered from a set album-promotion cycle, an interregnum that is post-Jenny From Thebes but too early for an album that’s due in November. Before a sold-out crowd at the Ardmore Music Hall just outside of Philadelphi, Darnielle, drummer Jon Wurster and multi-instrumentalist Matt Douglas ping-ponged through the extensive Mountain Goats discography. They reached back to 1995 (Darnielle’s three-song solo set, pitched to the die-hard fans of his boombox recordings, included “Ghosts,” “From TG&Y” and “Chanson Du Bon Chose”) and looked ahead to the forthcoming Through The Fire Across From Peter Balkan (“Born To Begin With,” part of a song cycle about the few hapless survivors of a shipwreck—Darnielle loves a concept).
The Mountain Goats seemed comfortable as a three piece without longtime bassist Peter Hughes, who amicably left the band little more than a year ago. Douglas occasionally played bass, but more often keyboards or saxophone or electric guitar, and Wurster’s drums mimicked a bass line on the moody “Luna” and a tender “Great Pirates.” Recent Mountain Goats albums, although varying widely in themes or focus, have leaned into a similar midtempo and spacious vibe, guided by Douglas’ creative arrangements. Live, they revamp some older songs accordingly, so that the set could begin with “New Britain” (from 1997’s Full Force Galesburg) and seamlessly follow with “Water Tower” (from 2023’s Jenny From Thebes). Casual fans would have trouble distinguishing 30-year old songs from new ones, with few exceptions.
That’s not to say everything sounded alike: “Corsican Mastiff Stride” skipped along to a staccato rhythm (Darnielle called it “a happy dance number”); “Waylon Jennings Live!” has, as Darnielle noted, “both kinds of music—country and western” and ended with a joyful hoedown. The set list was punctuated judiciously with the sure singalongs. Darnielle is such a smart, aphoristic writer that lines stick in your head and become credos, and fans sing or shout along to choruses such as “I am coming home to you, if it’s the last thing that I do” (from 2008’s “Sax Rohmer #1”) or “Saint Joseph’s baby aspirin, Bartles & Jaymes and you or your memory” (from 2005’s “You Or Your Memory”).
Three songs that produced start-to-finish crowd participation structured the set: 2002’s “The Best Death Metal Band In Denton” ended the band portion before Darnielle’s solo set with a communal, nostalgic sentiment and ecstatic shouts of “Hail Satan!” The main set ended euphorically with 2005’s “This Year”; it’s impossible not to be lifted by the track, especially in a community of like-minded people. Darnielle introduced it by saying, “This song will be mentioned in line one of my obituary.” Maybe that’s true, but a few years ago, he said something similar about 2002’s “No Children,” after it had become an unlikely viral hit on TikTok in 2021. That bitter divorce song ended the encore, and although it’s undeniably great, hearing a roomful shout, “In my life, I hope I lie/And tell everyone you were a good wife/I hope you die/I hope we both die” is a bit absurd. Fun and funny, but still. The band had been ending the Presentiments tour shows with a cover of Lou Reed’s “Sweet Jane,” and I’m sad that we missed hearing that as the parting thought. (Maybe they got tired, since earlier that day they had done a noontime radio performance.)
Darnielle has such a large body of work that no setlist will satisfy everyone. Even though this one included songs from 16 albums (the terrific The Sunset Tree, which celebrates its 20th anniversary with a newly remastered edition, got the most, with three), it skipped two of my personal favorites: 2017’s Goths and 2009’s The Life Of The World To Come.
We can look forward to November’s Through The Fire Across From Peter Balkan, which includes contributions from the Replacements’ Tommy Stinson and Hamilton auteur Lin-Manuel Miranda, and to Darnielle’s book of annotated lyrics for 365 of his songs coming in December (titled, of course, This Year).
The presentiments, for Mountain Goats fans, look terrific.
—Steve Klinge; photos by Dan DeLuca
