‘Days’ review: The Mountain Goats’ made a grunge match album

John Darnielle’s 24th Mountain Goats album, Days, is warm, funny and fast. It also says the same thing about four times too often.

The first thing you hear on Days is Jon Wurster playing the drum fill from “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Darnielle asked for it by name. Wurster played it, then pointed out that Dave Grohl took that fill from a Gap Band record years before Nirvana ever used it.

I love that story, because it’s the whole album in about four seconds. The sound everybody files under the exact moment the ’90s started was already secondhand, and the guy putting it on his record had the history a little wrong. Days is 12 songs about people we remember through a handful of images, told by a man who keeps discovering that the images were sketchy to begin with.

Days runs 36 minutes, which for this band counts as brisk. John Congleton produced it at Sear Sound in Manhattan, with Wurster on drums, Matt Douglas playing roughly everything else, Rob Jost on bass and French horn, and a rotating crew of guest singers. It started as a joke — Darnielle posted a bit on Bluesky about writing a Goths sequel called Grunges, complete with a fake song called “Contemplating Pearl Jam in the Carolina Dawn” — and then his wife left town for two weeks and the joke turned into an album.

Half of these songs are about being watched.

Charlie Sheen watches a Japanese horror movie, decides he’s seen an actual murder, calls the FBI. Layne Staley goes on national television in designer sunglasses while everybody at home sees a rock star having a great year. A narrator wonders whether anyone bothered to film a Renaissance concert. Woodstock ’99 turns up as a wall of camera crews and a shirtless guy screaming into a microphone.

We have hours of footage of Layne Staley. You can watch all of it and come away knowing almost as little as when you started. Same with the guys in Candlebox, with Sheen, with the woman singing prog at Carnegie Hall in 1975. These people got recorded more thoroughly than anyone in history. Yet the recordings turn out to be lousy evidence of who they were.

Darnielle came up in the Claremont, California scene. When labels asked him to try a real studio, he responded, in his words, like a man warding off Satan. He hated Alice In Chains. Hated Candlebox. He skipped every Charlie Sheen movie on purpose. He describes the whole scene as inoculating itself against fame by staying weird.

Now he writes an album about the people who did the opposite. That could easily feel smug — look what happened to the ones who wanted it — and Darnielle sidesteps it completely. He writes about these people as workers. Candlebox stops being an uncool major-label band and becomes four guys on a bus. Staley stops being the singer from Alice In Chains and becomes somebody who got exactly what he asked for and found out it solved none of his problems. At 59, Darnielle says looking back has started to feel normal and healthy to him. And you can hear him meaning it.

“Song for Layne Staley” uses the same line twice for opposite reasons.

The brilliance of sequencing “Song for Layne Staley” first is that it prevents the rest of Days from becoming cute rock-history tourism. In the first verse, everybody needs their own space on the floor and something to keep an eye out for. And it plays like a band starting up: rehearsal room, ambition, healthy paranoia about the competition.

Then the last verse comes back with everybody needing a peephole in the door and something to keep an eye out for. Identical setup. Completely rotted meaning.

The vigilance that got him a career is now the vigilance of a guy who only leaves the house after dark. And Darnielle gets that whole arc into 2 minutes and 12 seconds, which tells you what he can still do when the pen is going. He also spends 24 of that song’s lines on the same 2-line refrain, which tells you the other thing.

“Candlebox” is fiction, but only just.

In “Candlebox,” the narrator is in a fictional bar band that plays the county fair twice, gets scouted, and lands eight weeks opening for Candlebox. He remembers sleeping great on the bus because he was young and dumb. He remembers running out of things to say to his bandmates in the tents at festivals.

And then he compares the label’s accounting department to Roman bookkeepers at their desks the day Hannibal crossed the Alps. It’s a joke about timing: the empire is about to get flattened and the finance guys are still filing paperwork. He lands it with the actual punchline, which dares you to guess what the music video cost. Everybody could see the money was insane. Everybody spent it anyway.

Now the backstory, which is somehow better. In 1991, Darnielle was 24, sober by court order, working as a psychiatric nurse and handing his entire paycheck to a university bursar. He turned up at an open mic around 11:30 at night. The host asked his name, he said “the Mountain Goats,” and the host introduced him as John Mountain Goat.

That host was…Matt Nathanson. He wanted to be famous. His favorite band was U2. Darnielle spent the following months telling him weekly how much he hated U2. Anyway, Matt Nathanson sings backup on “Candlebox.” Incredible. Life finished the bit.

Two weeks before the single came out, Candlebox went looking for tour support and the Mountain Goats got the slot. The band in the song plays 25 tight minutes a night, seven nights a week, eight weeks straight. The actual Mountain Goats got two shows, because Darnielle caps his tours at three weeks now. He learned the lesson the guys in the song are about to learn.

The band earns its keep this time.

A fair knock on recent Mountain Goats records is that the arrangements mostly decorate the songs. Congleton fixes that in Days by letting the band itself supply the joke.

For example, “Song for Layne Staley” opens as skeletal acoustic Darnielle and then Wurster kicks the door in. “Annie Haslam Imperial Phase” runs on synth, saxophone and French horn with a modulation in the bridge steep enough to qualify as prog, which suits a song about the prog band Renaissance. Mikaela Davis plays harp on “Going to Fennario” and it floats the thing straight off the ground. “Shallow Grave” is a barroom shuffle about your own corpse, and the cheerfulness does most of the work.

The best gag, though, belongs to “Hidden Majesty of Later Venom Albums.” The lyric celebrates Venom, a Newcastle band whose entire charm involved skipping vocal harmony altogether. And Darnielle sings the word “free” over stacked harmonies from Janis Siegel of the Manhattan Transfer. She happened to be tracking on another floor of the same building. The best idea on the album actually came from an elevator ride.

“Annie Haslam Imperial Phase” catches memory lying.

This is my favorite small thing on the record. The narrator in “Annie Haslam Imperial Phase” admits he doesn’t know whether any footage of the Carnegie Hall show survives. Then he pictures it anyway: Renaissance played their most popular song, followed by another one that lasted 29 minutes.

And that number is basically exact. “Song of Scheherazade” runs 28:50 on the Live at Carnegie Hall album (including the spoken introduction). Which makes the uncertainty all the stranger. The performance hasn’t disappeared at all since we have the recording. We know what they played and how long they played it. What Darnielle can’t recover, though, is the image of Annie Haslam standing there.

In other words, an archive can preserve the event without preserving the actual person. You can know exactly what happened and still have to imagine what it felt like to be there.

Too many songs hand the microphone to a phrase.

“Song for Layne Staley” repeats its refrain 24 lines out of a 2-minute song. “Annie Haslam Imperial Phase” states its Carnegie Hall couplet 8 times. “Shallow Grave” says its title upward of 16. “Woodstock” chants one word. “Days” asks its question 6 times and answers it once, in the middle, before going back to its basics.

Some of that works fine. An addict’s refrain should loop past comfort. And “Best Hard Rock Albums 2013” builds the entire song on the bit. The verses hold the loveliest writing on the album — egrets frozen in a salt marsh, a childhood friend whose last name keeps slipping away, the look on your dad’s face the day you said your first word — and the chorus is a piece of SEO garbage from a defunct music blog.

He drops the thesis in two lines about somebody making a list so you can check off what you missed. The junk chorus is the point. Memory and content look identical from far enough away.

Everywhere else, though, the pattern is too obvious. It’s two great verses that found a nice phrase and clocked out. Darnielle’s verses do character work that maybe three living songwriters can match. His choruses do mood work that plenty of people can match. Over 12 tracks, that gap just keeps widening. And the smooth, major-key back half slides past you as textured noise more than once.

The gravestone trick.

“Shallow Grave” quotes a line you find on old headstones: as you are now, so once was I. The full inscription keeps going — as I am now, so you shall be — and the point of the whole thing is the threat. It’s a dead person telling a living one to get ready for their turn. Darnielle uses the first half and leaves the second half alone. He keeps I was where you are and drops you’re next.

That’s how he handles everybody here. Staley was a kid who wanted a band. The Candlebox openers slept fine. Annie Haslam went to work. He tells you what those lives felt like from the inside and skips the part where he warns you about your own.

Then “Last Day” hands you the second half anyway, flipped. Your final day will feel sweet, the fog will clear, whatever broke gets put back together. Same shape as the gravestone, rewritten as a promise. He even undercuts himself in the bridge, admitting the scripture stays vague about what comes after. Which is Darnielle in one gesture. He’ll comfort you and tell you in the same breath that he’s only guessing you’ll be all right.

The bottom line.

Days is the friendliest Mountain Goats record in years and the easiest one to forget. Congleton makes it all sound great, the songs stay short, the melodies stick, and the arrangements pull their weight. Yet all that polish sands down an album about how the past goes blurry until parts of the album go blurry too.

Four or five of these songs belong in the permanent set list. The rest are good company. What holds it together, though, is the thing Darnielle worked out somewhere between the Bluesky joke and the studio floor. That looking back kindly is its own skill.

The bands you mocked, the celebrity you ignored, the strangers on somebody’s camcorder, the version of you that thought a tour bus sounded fun — they all eventually turn into people who were trying to get through their allotted number of days.

‘Days’ is available now.

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Images courtesy of Cadmean Dawn Records.