“Gliddy glub gloopy/ Nibby nabby noopy/ La la la lo lo/ Sabba sibby sabba/ Nooby abba nabba/ Le le lo lo/ tooby ooby walla/ Nooby abba naba/ Early morning singing song.”
Needless to say, to someone accustomed to the bookish, transcendental lyrics like these lovingly displayed above, the generic, low-brow, and downright lifeless words of chief Mountain Goat John Darnielle don’t really rocketh my world with the same poetic intensity of say, Avril or Sir Jon Bon Jovi. You would think with 27 albums to his credit that he would eventually hit some sort of stride and start to produce a few bon mots of quality. But noooooooo.
Nah, I can’t keep up this charade any longer. It is a given that Darnielle has a gift of lyrical gab matched by very few (and peerless songwriting finesse to boot), so whenever word spreads that a new Mountain Goats album is coming down the pike, we get unusually giddy. Assisted by Franklin Bruno, Annie Clark, Erik Friedlander, Peter Hughes, Jon Wurster, and The Bright Mountain Choir, Heretic Pride will be released through 4AD on February 19, just in time to give your postal carrier [Editor's note: awwww yeah!!!] his or her belated Valentine’s Day gift. The album was produced by Scott Solter and John Vanderslice, features art by the godlike Vaughan Oliver, and contains 13 songs, none of which will match the nadir of expressive wizardry, Coldplay’s “Yellow” (“for you I’d bleed myself dry”... [oh no you wouldn’t, you whinging ass-bag!]).
1. Sax Rohmer #1
2. San Bernardino
3. Heretic Pride
4. Autoclave
5. New Zion
6. So Desperate
7. In the Craters on the Moon
8. Lovecraft in Brooklyn
9. Tianchi Lake
10. How to Embrace a Swamp Creature
11. Marduk T-Shirt Men’s Room Incident
12. Sept 15 1983
13. Michael Myers Resplendent
No, no, you're wrong, George Bernard Shaw... a heretic is always better live!
12.08.07 - London, England - Union Chapel
12.09.07 - Manchester, England - Moho Live
12.10.07 - Glasgow, Scotland - Oran Mor
