Mountain Goats Jettison All Dead Weight

One of the most noticeable things about the Mountain Goats, other than that they're great, is that no matter how you describe them, it sounds wrong. It's completely true to say that John Darnielle, the band's only permanent member, is a singer-songwriter who plays love songs on an acoustic guitar, but it's also utterly misleading.

In his dozens of releases, Darnielle has endlessly retread the same ground, writing hundreds of songs about doomed love, yams, doomed hate, death metal and insurance fraud. Again, saying he's written a few hundred songs that all sound remarkably similar is true, but wrong. Anyone who's spent most of his life making songs by himself, with endearingly terrible recording equipment, is going to have a certain tone, but after hearing only a few songs, ears that are ready for a bad tape recorder start to clamor for more.

Darnielle and his long-time bassist, Peter Hughes, played a terrific show Thursday night at the Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco. Ostensibly, they were touring for their new album, The Sunset Tree, but the concert was also full of old songs, all of which the obsessive Goats' fans knew, because they're obsessive.

Darnielle's lyrics, which are often as perfect as people think Bob Dylan's are, are a big reason his fans are so infatuated. A song might be one thought, flawlessly expressed, or it might be a whole chapter in an unwritten biography. He sang in "Dilaudid," panicking, "If we live to see the other side of this, I will remember your kiss. / So do it with your mouth open, / And take your foot off of the brake, / For Christ's sake!" Just as effortlessly, he turned tender in "Color in Your Cheeks": "He drove from in from Mexicali, no worse for wear. / ... But five minutes looking in his eyes and we all knew he was broken pretty bad, so we gave him what we had."

Tallahassee and We Shall All Be Healed, the first two Goats albums to come out on 4AD, their new label, were acquired tastes, since the production was bad-Darnielle was clearly not used to having money, so everything just got glossy. Especially on Tallahassee, it was sometimes hard to realize that a song was even good before hearing it live, without all the distracting extra sounds.

Luckily, The Sunset Tree is different. It's the first Mountain Goats album that balance the see-saw right between gloss and guts, benefiting from its producer, John Vanderslice, the bearer of a glorious surname and a pretty good musician himself-he appeared Thursday to play guitar on a few songs, including a compelling version of a beautiful old fan favorite, "Source Decay."

Perhaps the album's best song is "Dance Music," a heartbreaking, tiny autobiography. The sprightly piano gives the song a catchiness that underlines the lyrics' desperation. During a parental fight, Darnielle sings, "I dash upstairs to take cover, / Lean in close to my little record player on the floor, / So this is what the volume knob's for. / I listen to dance music." At the pianoless concert, with just Darnielle and Hughes giving it their old-time best, the song made up for its simplicity with direct force.

"Dilaudid" doesn't depend on its nervous, staccato strings, but they do help an already-great song. Thursday, the strings were replaced by Jeff McLeod from openers The Double, who powered the driving, paranoid song with intent drumbeats, redeeming his band's poor impression of Interpol, a band that has already become its own bad ripoff.

The best part of the concert, among many intense performances of flawless songs, was an improvisation. Hughes remarked that T-shirts were for sale, and Darnielle started to sing about the subject.

At first, it seemed like he was just cracking a brief joke, but then he went on, and got funnier as he went, arguing that not only was a Mountain Goats shirt an asset to familial harmony, but that Cardinal Ratzinger would have made a better impression on his first day as Pope if he'd been wearing a Mountain Goats shirt.

And Darnielle was probably right: Justly, the world press should leap to glorify anything related to the Goats.

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