There are few artists who make albums as penetrating and revelatory as John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats. The Sunset Tree in 2005 was a haunting, bare-bones exploration of Darnielle's abusive childhood, while Get Lonely, released in 2006, is one of the most excellent heartbreak albums you'll find, free of clichés and steeped in evocative honesty.
Frequently concerned with religious themes, particularly forgiveness and redemption, on this album, Darnielle names each of the 12 tracks after a different Bible verse, centering around the lessons he's learned.
This is by no means a religious album, however. Darnielle is a lapsed Catholic (the group's last album was called Heretic Pride), and he tends to approach the Bible stories as instructive rather than do-or-die rules. And while the band's material has never centered around crafting accessible chart-toppers, The Life of the World to Come is an even thornier affair.
On the opening track, "1 Samuel 15:23," Darnielle is backed by little more than a hushed acoustic guitar, though he sounds far more ominous than welcoming. Like the rest of this album's material, this song is deceptively simple, all the more jarring for its bareness.
And not all of the disc is downbeat. "Psalms 40:2" is a battle cry, full of jittery guitars, taut drums and Darnielle's smoky, emotive vocals. "Genesis 3:23" is warm and confident, with the instrumentation more fleshed out as Darnielle channels Adam and Eve, which describes breaking into the house he used to live in. As always, the images are uneasy but lovely, undoing the notion of what "home" means once you've left it.
It is stunning how Darnielle takes each verse and crafts a modern-day story around it, taking the more general lessons and making them pierce your very heart. Perhaps most evocatively, "Matthew 25:21" depicts Darnielle flying home from tour to be with his mother-in-law as she fades away from terminal cancer. Amid a quiet haze of guitars, he imagines himself as "an airplane tumbling wing over wing" and as the song trickles away to nothing, he sings, "It's three days later when I get the call / And there's nobody around to break my fall."
For all its hushed contemplation, the album ends in forward-motion with "Ezekial 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace," which belies the slow, piano-based backing with its lyrics about a strung-out drug addict taking a hostage and driving "to make Culiacán by sunset." Even as the world explodes around him, he just keeps driving, and on their 17th disc, The Mountain Goats have done the same, crafting a beautiful album that is as sparse as it is rich, letting the silence speak volumes.
