Cathedral Songs of Mountain Goats and Fauns

It's hard to upstage, in writing, how much we need music. The description isn't even an echo. If you were there, on the floor, shoulder-to-shoulder with the strangers and singing along, it might spark a memory. Or it might not. And anyway, that's not what I'm interested in here.

I was at two shows this week, the Mountain Goats at the Showbox Market, which is downtown's gritty rock palace, a sprawling, sunken main floor overlooked by terraced bars; and Faun Fables at Neumo's, along with Chop Suey the ideal of the indie Capitol Hill music club: a shoebox of a room with a concession stand of a bar at the side.

The Showbox was already full during Owen Palett's Final Fantasy set; he closed with what he said was a song by Theodor Adorno: "Independence is no solution for modern babies." Babies (read "hipsters"), we learned, just want to dance. Adorno, I have just read, was critical of the replacement of art's merit by its social value. Music becomes a fetish when you enjoy it because other people like it.

The Mountain Goats

That is not John Darnielle's problem. His album The Life of the World to Come is twelve songs all titled after Biblical verses, selections from Hebrews 11:40 to Matthew 25:21. Here's an mp3 of "Genesis 3:23," which contains the chorus, "I used to live here." It's about a return to a childhood home, and there is also a superposition of a naive Eden of faith, "creeds and prayers that he can't wholly buy into" these days. (Maybe this is also why he's at the keyboard more often on this album, which impersonates a heretic organist's hymnal.)

Darnielle is a strange apparition in concert--skipping about the stage, face contorted in a middle-schooler's rockgod transport, he can remind you of David Byrne's spasmodic too-much-coffee guy except without the cool, self-appraising distance. Between songs, he drops little drawled hints as to their inspiration in a pleasantly low-key manner that contrasts with his higher, forced-nasal singing register.

He's funny, disarming, and a master of unsettling emotional harmonics. "Thank You Mario But Our Princess Is In Another Castle" was prefaced by an explanation of his delight at unexpectedly freeing a "little dude" instead of the princess. That bright "8-bit choir" catharsis has its malevolent bass counterpart in "Hast Thou Considered The Tetrapod," as the protagonist is battered by an abusive drunk.

The new album is more reflective than entrail-spilling, and as likely to question its Biblical sources ("Romans 10:9" contrasts the redemption of confession against taking your medication before you have anything to confess) as to quote them. The religious lessons that Darnielle has learned, or found, are in his music, despite the nods to the Bible.

His congregation knows his hymns: "This Year," "Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton," and "No Children" were not simply sing-alongs. They were filled with that off-kilter unison of sickly, bruised spirit calling out for the Lord to make their footsteps firm, only here it was "And I hope you die / I hope we both die," shouted out with a strange, savage joy. It was live music.

Faun Fables

Faun Fables at Neumo's brought an unusual number of gray ponytails to the hipster temple, and young women in handmade, hand-dyed apparel. Two middle-aged men shared snowshoeing pictures on an iPhone waiting for the music to start. Dawn McCarthy (who grew up in Spokane) and Nils Frykdahl conducted a kind of East Bay ritual short on pomp, long on intimate presence. Like the Mountain Goats, their songs (it's primarily McCarthy's act) are driven by the stories they tell, less beholden to pop's incessant verse-chorus-versing.

The two were dressed in faun costumes, tunics faintly tinged with rock bravado in slashes of green felt straps. McCarthy's voice is a neo-folk instrument, a quirky lute, while Frykdahl accesses both a baritone and a mountain troll's scratched-granite bass. McCarthy says, "To me, life has always felt like a place reverberating with all kinds of shrieking and laughing things." They too have their hymns: to the roadkill carrion, the ever-welcoming housekeeper, and the prairies of Nebraska.

That last was new and, McCarthy said, was a "pioneer love song." It closed with a glimpse of violet eyes--much of Faun Fables discography seems to take place in twilight in a forest clearing. The songs range from eerie, blasted prog-rock soundscapes, to positively antique ballads that evoke troubadours with flowing sleeves. A song about sweeping the house had a martial drumbeat, McCarthy keeping a counterpoint rhythm with sticks.

Here, too, the crowd recognized each song. They swayed gently, like prairie grasses. While Nils stowed their gear at the end, McCarthy sang what she termed a lullaby. A peasant contentment filled the room, which had come to feel like a tavern. Maybe there were bones flecked with meat in the corner, and beer dregs in cups. They would be tidied up later. Music is not religion, but it feels as old.