‘We will see them again’: Waiting out the new world on Songs for Pierre Chuvin
In the valedictory, finger-picked closer to the Mountain Goats’s new album, Songs for Pierre Chuvin, John Darnielle tenderly asserts: ‘The places we met up to share our secrets now and then — / We will see them again.’ It’s a less strident hope than ‘I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me,’ though the new song, ‘Exegetic Chains,’ does in fact call back to the hook of Darnielle’s best-known account of a desperate drive towards freedom. It’s a hope that suits the times, however, and a vision of the future scattered throughout these new recordings, produced during the early weeks of the escalating coronavirus pandemic in America: things will go back to the way they used to be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzMpxTechVI
I don’t mean to suggest that the new Mountain Goats tape — recorded for the first time since the early 2000s using the bashed-up Panasonic RX-FT500 boombox which the singer relied on throughout his lo-fi solo days — is in any sense a direct allegory for the collective trauma of COVID-19-induced self-isolation and its seismic effect on the functioning of daily society. But Darnielle’s set of Songs for Pierre Chuvin repeatedly imagine a future where a temporary interruption to normality will be rapidly overturned, becoming an aberration, an anomaly: ‘a momentary ripple in the stream.’
The new cassette brings together a range of familiar topics, some of which take on surprising resonances in the climate which enabled their recording. In the violent uprising foreseen in ‘Until Olympius Returns,’ we hear the kind of giddy death-drive which fires the revenge party in ‘Up The Wolves’: ‘We’re gonna bribe the officials / We’re gonna kill all the judges / It’s gonna take you people years to recover from all of the damage.’ This song in particular foregrounds resistance to a tyrant with whom it’s prudent to ‘Nod in agreement’ until the chance arises to burn the whole thing down: phrases which link obliquely with Darnielle’s increasingly incredulous Twitter commentary on the Trump administration’s crisis response.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YpcwNIfwno
And the focus on late antiquity — Darnielle’s source material comes from a scholarly account of the ‘last pagans’ surviving in the fourth and fifth century Roman Empire — marks a return to the earliest days of the project, where in his own words, the young classics major would come home from class ‘fired up’ and ready to write songs about the ‘stories about Ajax and Agamemnon and the cult of Cybele’ which he was discovering in college. Early titles include Transmissions to Horace, Songs for Petronius, and the Hercules-inspired ‘Deianara Crush’; in the liner notes to 1994’s Beautiful Rat Sunset, Darnielle thanks ‘Aeschylus, though he probably would have found this record confusing on a number of levels.’
This also isn’t the first time Darnielle, a practising and progressive Christian, has marshalled the perspective of opponents of the faith: most famously in the adlibbed ‘Hail Satan’ which brings ‘The Best Death Metal Band Out of Denton’ to its raucous ending, but also in the sustained narratives of ‘Heretic Pride’ and ‘Cry for Judas.’ It’s easy to see how the last pagans, hunted and snarling, determined to fight to the end, might have caught the attention of a writer so consistently engaged by the stories of hold-outs and hopeless cases, from the mid-tier goth bands ‘playing clubs since 1981’ in ‘Abandoned Flesh’ and the blisteringly stubborn ‘Krishnacore Bands’ of a recent live-only track, to the tetrapod on 2005’s landmark The Sunset Tree, ‘the last of a lost civilisation,’ who waits, apparently for eons, to ‘wriggle up on dry land.’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSrWPzekYec
To these symbols of resistance and tenacity, we can now add the belated polytheists of Songs for Pierre Chuvin, praying to ‘whomever you call out to in the night’ for their former, lost world to be restored. There is a wistfulness that pervades the record, for being ‘out in the streets, free and young,’ before the imposition of the Christian ‘new guys’ — ‘humourless men’ who impose an unwelcome and implicitly restrictive ideology wherever they spread. Some of Darnielle’s pagans try to stay ‘under the radar,’ to ‘keep to our own kind’ — they come to accommodate ‘the burden of exile,’ to the point where they might ‘sometimes forget there’s cities down there.’
There is a complicated pleasure to be found in this sparsely-populated landscape, as there is in the images circulating of animal life stepping out into quietened streets: ‘Feel the ocean breeze / We will never run out of trees.’ That impulse finds its fullest, post-human expression in ‘For the Snakes,’ a jaunty update of Lamartine’s Romantic vision of the ruins of the Roman Coliseum infested with lizards: Darnielle’s reptiles take one look at ‘all your abandoned things / Once-fine columns, statues with wings’ before joyously attempting to ‘slither across them in the sun.’ More common, however, is a tone of lament: when, if ever, will these rapacious conquerors — ‘no sacred place could be denied them’ — ‘restore the temple of Isis at Memphis’? And what should we do if things never go back to normal?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOyI2hG1fck
One alternative to this acquiescence is embodied by the edgy, menacing ‘Hopeful Assassins of Zeno,’ where the titular figures make a special effort to ‘be nice to the guys who wear necklaces with crosses,’ all while waiting for their chance to strike. But with ‘no good end in view,’ no possibility of turning the tide, it might be the case that the only thing to do is ‘dance for the God on the throne’ — even if they ‘come catch me and arrest me mid-step / Let me go down dancing, let me be the last one left.’ Sometimes, Darnielle proposed on The Sunset Tree, dance music is almost the only means of survival. Leonard Cohen, around the release of Old Ideas, suggested something similar: that he frequently took ‘the position of the man standing up in the face of something that is irrevocable and unyielding and singing about it. It’s the position that the Greek Zorba had — that when things get really bad, you just raise your glass and stamp your feet and do a little jig and that’s about all you can do.”
This faith in music, when there is little else to hold on to, sounds out particularly strongly in the unusual context of this recording. For nearly twenty years, the Mountain Goats have been a studio band, making use of increasingly sophisticated arrangements; they’ve released albums with no guitars at all, albums driven by plangent piano, albums with horn sections and barber-shop vocal harmonies. All of that, like the apparently vibrant world of the last pagans, has been stripped away here, by necessity rather than design: for the first time in a long time, Darnielle is alone with his tape recorder, doing what he can without outside assistance.
The recordings are remarkably naked and unadorned, despite the growth in the artist’s musicianship from his early years: at times, hearing the Mountain Goats return to this context gives me the feeling of the caged Tasmanian tiger whose voice Darnielle inhabits on ‘Deuteronomy 2:10,’ pacing back and forth in a small enclosure, feeling ‘in my bones just what the future has in store’ — the imminent extinction of his species. These are songs recorded, literally, in a box which their writer outgrew many years ago. At times, for me, there’s a sadness to this — a return to a very real and quite stark limitation, talent pushing up against the hard edges of technique.
But Darnielle conveys the tenderness of this reunion with an ‘old friend’ — as he calls the boombox on the YouTube recording of ‘Exegetic Chains’ — ‘Change will come / Stay warm inside the ripple of the Panasonic hum.’ Acknowledging openly for the first time the conditions of the recording process as a direct part of the song recorded, he praises the equipment which allowed him to find artistic release, and his fans to find solace, while also considering its transience, the need we all have to leave familiar things behind one day.
It’s strange to be going back to the boombox, and Darnielle knows it, but in owning that choice (and the unprecedented parameters within which it was taken), he creates space both for nostalgia and for closure. We can’t stay warm inside that ripple forever, but perhaps its hum and grind is as good a place as any to shelter in place until all this is over. The boombox will go back into the cupboard one day — I suspect after this he won’t be using it again — but it’s here right now, and it’s meaningful, and its own antiquity offers one way of dealing with a world accelerating at astonishing speed.
Everybody hold a spot, these songs seem to be saying, until normality returns, or at least a world closer to the one we recognise. We are all of us, currently, ‘deep in the dream chamber,’ missing public space, missing community, making sense of our isolation as best we can. These songs, crabbed and hurried as they necessarily are, offer a sense of hope and solidarity. Even on the brink of doom, they picture the other side: ‘Make it through this year / If it kills us outright.’
