Live Review: The Mountain Goats, Wednesday, Nov. 11 @ the Wonder Ballroom-- Local Cut

Live Review: The Mountain Goats, Wednesday, Nov. 11 @ the Wonder Ballroom

November 12th, 2009 [5:25PM] Posted by: Ben Waterhouse | 0 COMMENTS

Review by WW’s food and theater critic, Ben Waterhouse.

John Darnielle was in a good mood last night. Maybe it was the vegetarian platter he ate for dinner at Queen of Sheba (I was star-struck on the way to the bathroom when I ran across him eating, alone, at the MLK Blvd. Ethiopian joint), but I’ve never seen the Mountain Goats frontman so chatty. He lectured, in his breathless, endearingly geeky style, about the prophet Jonah, the psychological phenomenon of confabulation, the romantic tragedy of Mario Brothers and his realization that the city of Portland, where he spent a year of youthful dissipation, is not out to kill him. More on that later.

These days it really makes sense to call Darnielle, who recorded and performed solo under the Mountain Goats bandle for years, a frontman. The band has now expanded, at least for this tour, to include a fourth member, axman Perry Owen Wright. This formulation of the group is most definitely a rock band, and the show boasted new, loud arrangements of “Handball,” “Against Pollution” and “See America Right.” (check out the whole setlist at the forums).

Darnielle still takes a solo break in the middle of the show, allowing for a nice blend of his old arrangements and new, full-band material. During the solo stretch last night he described the experience of returning to the apartment building on Northeast Broadway where he lived the terrible year that he describes on We Shall All Be Healed. It’s a brick apartment building near the intersection with Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., with one of those clunky call phones at the front door, which Darnielle stared at until a woman walked out, and he walked in. “I found a door I left a scuff mark on when I lived there,” he said. “The mark was still there.” That experience became a song on the new album, “Genesis 3:23.”

By the end of the show, which included a larger-than-usual quantity of biblical imagery, Darnielle was pacing the lip of the stage, reaching out to touch fans, singing through an ecstatic grin. He’s become a sort of preacher of self-revival, unaffected, unselfconscious, apparently reluctantly agnostic. His Gospel consists of rock ‘n’ roll and poetry and no small amount of actual Gospel, and he sells it with inspired fervor. You want holy spirit? The Mountain Goats are possessed.

A word about the opener: In Wednesday’s paper, I described Final Fantasy as “cheery electropop.” This is an inadequate label, drawn from a cursory listening to Owen Pallett’s MySpace tracks. The band’s (it has 1.5 members) live show involves an impressive layering of bloopy keys, tapped drums and violin trills over Pallett’s airy tenor voice. It’s a complex, often dissonant sound, not really my thing but impressive nonetheless. Pallett coaxes a surprisingly broad atmospheric range out of his fiddle, from echoey thrumming and electric rain to big bass thumps and shrieking moans. Some of the tunes were quite beautiful.

John Darnielle with Owen Pallett in Seattle last weekend: