We Review: The Mountain Goats/Jeffrey Lewis @ Neumos

Neumos was sold out Saturday night, and over-sold. By the time the Mountain Goats appeared for a sweaty, high-humidity singalong ("St. Joseph's baby aspirin," "Way out in Seattle"), there was not an unpeopled space on the main floor. Security policed a thin strip around the edges of the room, ordered people off chairs, cleared the knot of people on the back stairs hoping for a better view. Upstairs, where the sound is not as good, it was three rows deep at the rail.

Looking like the everyman John Cusack would play in the movie, John Darnielle still has a teenager's reedy tenor, in contrast to his grown-man's, slow-footed cadence when apologizing for having a lyric cheat sheet for a new song.

Heretic Pride (here's the comic-book liner notes) is the new album, a smorgasbord of more musically polished, less intimate songs that resist being summed up by a single theme--instead they form a flypaper constellation of Darnielle's fixations. "Sax Rohmer #1" fingers the viscera of longing uniting two people; in "Autoclave," his heart sterilizes his love, an unstable, bloody, foamy mass.

Maybe two people wilted and left early. The rest were of the same mind as the guy by the bar, who proclaimed that when it came to the Mountain Goats, he skipped the booze and just had a few beers. He wanted to make sure he caught every second.

NYC's Jeffrey Lewis and the Jitters opened with a spoken-word poetry song about ramen, and much of his set, including the Crass covers, trod the holey-jeans ground of the alternative artist, searching for visibility without losing that priceless indie cred. In "Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror" he thinks he spots Oldham on the train into the city and interrogates him for the trick to indie success. Like a malevolent deity, Oldham (if it was Oldham) demonstrates that it's the fate of the artist to get fucked and write songs about it.

Lewis is also a comic book artist, and he presented two lo-fi "music videos" (slides projected as he sang): one about identity apparel and a goofy ballad about the "Creeping Brain." He sings in a deadpan, almost Halo-Benders-ish way, the beat comically landing on the rhyme, except when he stuffs a few extra syllables into a line. His lyrical monologues are wordy, clever, playful, and that keeps the sociocultural analysis from trending grim when he wonders how long he can go on like this. In any event, it works. We ended up despising corporate music labels, you know, their whole buy-sell-to-infinity thing, for several minutes afterwards.