MOUNTAIN GOATS - Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan

Fellow castaways, all aboard! We're lost amid the waves of the Ocean, forever searching for a safe harbor. The Mountain Goats, this time, take us out to sea in the middle of a storm, aboard a vessel fatally doomed to sink. Will captain Peter Balkan and the fifteen men of his crew manage to save their skins? Spoiler: given that this is a Mountain Goats record, that would be a bit like asking Sophocles for a happy ending…

One morning in May 2023, John Darnielle woke up with a note in his phone: “Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan”. It was the transcription of a dream. And it was also the start of a new journey. Now more than ever, after all, the engine driving a band like the Mountain Goats is the urge to push themselves further: which, for Darnielle and co., means chasing an ever more elaborate sound. So it's no surprise that the new album aims to broaden its horizons even further than its predecessor, “Jenny From Thebes”, thanks above all to the orchestrations of multi-instrumentalist Matt Douglas (this time also serving as producer). But also thanks to a collection of songs with more direct hooks than usual, which entrust even the most dramatic moments to a glistening chamber-pop.

And so here we are aboard Peter Balkan's fishing boat, the scent of the wind in the air and its intoxicating sense of freedom: floating over the strings, “Fishing Boat” kicks off the adventure under the banner of apparent lightness. At least until the screams start rising to the sky and the fateful calm after the storm forces everyone to face reality: “Me and Peter Balkan and you, friend/ Everybody else is dead”. Three men, three survivors, three perspectives on a single story: the narrator, his friend Adam, and captain Peter Balkan.

The Mountain Goats themselves, in the meantime, are now down to three: during 2024, longtime bassist Peter Hughes had to reluctantly bid farewell to the band (for “a tedious multitude of reasons involving health and sanity”). “Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan” (released on the band's own label, Cadmean Dawn) is dedicated to him, “who served aboard the good ship Mountain Goats for so many years”.

Darnielle envisions the album as the soundtrack to a musical, but – despite the presence of Lin-Manuel Miranda on backing vocals (the man chiefly responsible for the success of “Hamilton”) – it's really just another variation on a theme the Mountain Goats have always held dear, the concept album. The difference being that, this time around, the plot and its characters follow a far more linear narrative than usual. And that, serving as a prologue, there's an actual instrumental “Ouverture”, just like in musicals, which anticipates the recurring themes of the songs.

The shipwreck at the heart of the album plays out almost like a new birth, like opening your eyes for the first time on the things around you (“Wake up in the arms of the earth/ Fully present at the second birth”, Darnielle announces over the jagged rhythms of Jon Wurster's drums in “Cold At Night”, while the strings counterpoint the electric guitar): you discover the strength of survival, you discover just how cold the night can get. And above all, you learn to reckon with your own mortality (“The first thing you learn is that there's always a clock ticking somewhere”).

The island where the characters wash up becomes the setting for a kind of threefold castaway's path – which, in the end, is simply a way of depicting three different approaches to life. The first, Peter Balkan's, is the apocalyptic approach: if the world we're used to knowing dissolves around us, it must mean the entire universe has reached its end. In “Dawn Of Revelation”, a propulsive rock track with wave inflections is colored by eschatological visions of royal thrones and shifting tectonic plates, but in “Armies Of The Lord” the prophecies of redemption and reward seem to reveal themselves as nothing more than a feverish dream.

The second path, meanwhile, is that of surrender: over the soft folk tones of “Rocks In My Pockets”, Adam disappears from his companions' sight with his pockets full of stones, as harp and piano gently brush the shore (“Some learn to ride the currents/ Some never learn”).

The narrator's voice remains, and the path he chooses is one of care: patiently tending to the captain's bandages, letting the melody of "Your Bandage" coil onward into its instrumental coda; indulging the delirium and the visions, seeking peace in "Peru" like a flower able to grow between the cracks of a canyon. The plastic, loping gait and the glimmering keyboards of "Your Glow" accompany his final farewell to Peter Balkan, trying to piece things back together with the medicine of realism: "If there's nothing left but water/ Then let water be enough".

What will be left, the day archaeologists land on that island, with not even a visible trace remaining of the time Peter Balkan and his fellow castaways spent on this earth? Darnielle asks himself this in the brisk epilogue of "Broken To Begin With", driven on by the guitar riff and Matt Douglas's sax. And it's a bit like asking what will be left of us on our very last day ("And if that day turns out to be today/ Maybe that's okay"): perhaps the ability to care for one another will be the only thing to leave a mark, like the embers of that fire which kept three men warm through the night, in the solitude of a beach somewhere in the middle of the Ocean.

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27/11/2025