MOUNTAIN GOATS - Days

E il sole che si leva
È sole tramontato
Per levarsi di nuovo
Dal suo luogo
(Qohélet, trad. di Guido Ceronetti)

What will remain of yesterday, now that it's over? John Darnielle claims to be allergic to nostalgia, and yet the past is one of the central themes running through the songbook of the Mountain Goats. What he can't stand is the consoling shelter of memory, the things were better when they were worse mindset. But, on the threshold of his sixties, he's discovered a little more indulgence toward remembrance.
The idea for "Days" was born almost as a game, around a discarded title: "Grunges", the ideal follow-up to "Goths" (the 2017 album devoted to the followers of the dark scene), this time centered on the Nineties. An amarcord steeped in wistfulness for the era of flannel plaid shirts? Not even close. Back then, Darnielle couldn't have cared less about grunge. Instead, it's a device for pondering the meaning of time's passing, the desire to be remembered, the epiphany of the present instant.

In "Days", then, the elegy for the Nineties is really just a pretext, starting with "Song For Layne Staley", dedicated to the unforgettable voice of Alice In Chains (complete with an explicit nod to grunge's most iconic drum fill, the one from "Smells Like Teen Spirit"). His place is in that gallery of tragic figures Darnielle has been singing about practically forever, characters doomed to succumb to their own fate (from the Judy Garland of "All Eternals Deck" to the Amy Winehouse of "Transcendental Youth"). Its secret lies in the antithesis between the dream ("This is what you wanted/ When you were a kid") and the disillusionment ("I don't want this/ I don't need this"), which resonates as the guitars erupt.
What immediately lightens the mood, though, is "Charlie Sheen Reaches Out To The Feds" (driving pace, lively sax and infectious backing vocals), which plays on the anecdote of a Charlie Sheen — probably not exactly lucid at the time — so rattled by the Japanese horror film "Guinea Pig 2" that he called the FBI, convinced he'd witnessed a real snuff movie...

The songs on "Days" work like this: they're a web of hypertexts stretching from the metal parable of Venom ("Hidden Majesty Of Later Venom Albums") all the way to the California gravestone of the criminal Eddie Nash ("Crying On Eddie Nash's Grave"). Major keys dominate, along with vocal harmonies and crisp, bright guitars (John Congleton is always a safe bet, and his production here is one of the most successful in the Mountain Goats' recent discography). An outgoing, concise record, in the vein of "Bleed Out" and "Beat The Champ". "But don't be fooled," Darnielle slyly warns, "some of these songs are really sad."
"The point is that all our titanic efforts, in the end, get forgotten." Dreaming of headliner status while touring as Candlebox's support act, shouting an improbable declaration of love for cocaine onstage at Woodstock '99: it's all vanity. Nobody remembers that Renaissance played Carnegie Hall, Darnielle notes over Steely Dan-tinged shades on "Annie Haslam Imperial Phase". "But there's a sweetness in the fact that everything fades away," he adds, "just as it will for each of us."

Sweet and bitter, that's the flavor of "Days". A memento mori lit up by the brisk gait of "Shallow Grave", where bodies don't stay buried for long (who else but Darnielle could reference the ending of "Carrie" in a song?), and where death doesn't equal annihilation, but rather the final form of our existence. So, accompanied by the crystalline sound of the hammered dulcimer, Darnielle transfigures the Fennario of the traditional "Peggie-O" into an otherworldly destination, wrapping the folk tale of "Going To Fennario" in the scent of the Grateful Dead: "Traditional songs are lucid and free of sentimentality when they talk about death and change, they're songs that present life as it is."
Over the plastic rhythm of the title track, the question becomes a kind of hymn to impermanence: "Do you know how short the days are? No, you don't". Being fully present now, in this moment: that's the point. Because forever, as Emily Dickinson put it, is composed of many nows. And it's precisely those nows that the Mountain Goats of "Days" want to celebrate, right up to the joyous epilogue of "Last Day": the last day will be sweet, gentle even in its weeping. The organ carries a gospel flavor, and wisdom is made of simple things: "Well, you know what the prophets say/ Keep a good thought in your mind/ Don't leave anybody behind".

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12/08/2026