One thing you can say about John Darnielle is that he’s done things his own way. Aside from his work as one half of the Extra Glenns, he has recorded a substantial body of work on a Panasonic RX-FT500 boom box, and released it on cassettes, 7″ singles, and CDs since the early ’90s as the Mountain Goats. That is, he records his music, usually solo but sometimes sparsely accompanied, on a BOOM BOX. Perhaps you have to be a musician to understand how utterly disorienting this is. Young musicians are raised to genuflect in the direction of badly decorated, stale smelling state-of-the-art studios. The more expensive and exclusive, the deeper the bow. The answer seems to have come in a flash of genius to Darnielle: do away with it all - if the boom box sounds good, stick with it.
At this point it should be noted that The Extra Glenns’ Martial Arts Weekend is a studio recording. But don’t hold that too much against it. If nothing else, it serves as a convenient entry point into Darnielle’s work, thanks, at least in part, to Extra Glenn Frank Bruno’s contribution of tasteful instrumental counterpoint. Though the overall effect is a kind of dilution of Darnielle’s Spartan aesthetic, which is conceivably the best format for his music’s presentation, the Mountain Goats records may be easier to understand after an introduction through the Glenns. (For more background on the Mountain Goats and reviews of some recent CDs, you need not look further than this site — Jeremy Schneyer reviews All Hail West Texas and the compilation CD Ghana, and Charles Marshall covers The Coroner’s Gambit in these pages.)
Mr. Darnielle has a way with lyrics that is at once poetic and journalistic. See “Going To Marrakesh” for the following: “the fog is lifting from the water / the bells are sounding on the boats / and our love is a monster (plain and simple) / thought you weigh it down with stones to try to drown it / it floats”. Or how about this for a blues call-and-response: “the train touched down in Sioux City, Iowa / the train touched down in Sioux City, Iowa / it fell cleanly from the dark sky onto the track / saw you from the window, there was no turning back” from “Terminal Grain”. In addition to being clever and insightful, he delivers his lines with a rhythmic flair that offers as much zig and zag as a good drummer should, so you tend not to notice the absence of one after a while.
Frank Bruno (Glenn B to Darnielle’s Glenn D) is best known for fronting Nothing Painted Blue and his own solo recordings. On Martial Arts Weekend he serves as a one-man orchestra, painting across Darnielle’s skeletal frames with guitars, bass and keyboards. He’s also credited with co-writing the material. Though it mostly bears Darnielle’s stamp, Bruno is a clever and wordy lyricist himself, and so the distribution of the collaboration is difficult to measure. Suspect that, if nothing else, some of the more traditional pop choruses on the album are his. Instrumentally, his palate is varied: on “All Rooms Cable A/C Free Coffee”, for example, his bass provides a layer of pop propulsion, while tasty slide riffing sounds like Jimmy Page dropped by the session.
With the exception of the unconvincing cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Memories”, the album maintains a high level of lyrical invention and pleasant tunefulness, and even numbers amongst its tracks four bona fide gems (“Going to Marrakesh”, the rocking “Terminal Grain”, the surreal blues “Going to Morocco”, and “The River Song”). Yet there’s something that precludes an emphatic recommendation. It may be that the air of casual creation that is responsible for the album’s charm also leaves it sounding a bit undercooked. But perhaps you should judge for yourself.