July 30 - Sax Rohmer #1

It's easy and not necessarily helpful to talk about eras of Mountain Goats songs. Certainly it's clear that songs with the mechanical groan of a tape recorder belong to a particular period -unless they don't - but other indicators are vaguer. There's several albums where the songs become much more personal, there's many points where the music gets more experimental, or John's love of pastiche comes to the fore. But these periods blend into each other.

I'm saying all this to slightly undermine my own point, namely that this song is a great example of John Darnielle fusing the original Mountain Goats sound and aesthetic to the modern. This is a song about one of John's obscure influences: the weird, compelling, and incredibly racist adventure novelist Sax Rohmer, but it alludes to him rather than talking about him, and is ultimately about something else. This is pure early Mountain Goats. This is also a song with the gift that John honed for addictive interesting wordplay. The repeated "every" and "all" stanza ends are a structure as clever as it is catchy, and the chorus is as shout-along as that of No Children. Annie Clark is on electric guitar. The song has a video.

Ultimately Heretic Pride is John saying that he can take all the stuff he was interested and obsessed with on his early albums and do it now. Not better, because what does "better" mean in this context? But in a manner that has had more time to build, that is more aware of its own capabilities and potential.