The Mountain Goats’ “Bleed Out” Will Leave a Mark on You

Image courtesy of The Guardian

By Caleb Lovell

Fans of heart-pounding action and thrills need not look to movie theaters this year to find their next hit. One needs only to glance at the cover of The Mountain Goats’ Bleed Out to anticipate the adrenaline rush that this album will provide. That is to say, to draw from the wellspring of wisdom from one of rock ‘n’ roll’s most notorious bands, AC/DC,“If you want blood, you’ve got it.”

For those who are unfamiliar, The Mountain Goats is the moniker of indie singer-songwriter, John Darnielle. Darnielle is not only one of the most scholarly music artists of his generation, but also one of the most prolific. His music career spans twenty full-length records dating back the mid-90s, and he has released four of those records in just the last three years.

Darnielle’s prowess as a songwriter has something to do with his unique taste and obsession with intriguingly obscure subjects. In the past decade, he has birthed several albums that explore these select topics in Darnielle’s distinct storytelling fashion. 2015’s Beat the Champ is one notable example, an album that revolved almost entirely around the subject of professional wrestling. Another is 2020’s Songs for Pierre Chuvin, which was inspired by a book by the late French historian entitled A Chronicle of the Last Pagans (1990).  

On this newest Goats record, Darnielle has a newfound muse – foreign 80s action films.

Nowhere else does Darnielle make his motive for making the record more clear than on the deafening chorus of the album’s opening track: “I am doing this for revenge!!!” This is not to insinuate that Darnielle himself has a thirst for blood, though the characters in these songs are probably not people you’d want to run into in a dark alley. Some of them “haven’t checked a mirror in years,” and others might just “look like your neighbors,” but they are all similar in their desperate causes and drastic measures. 

Another factor that distinguishes this album from its predecessors is its upbeat tempo. Bleed Out is notably more fast paced than 2021’s Dark in Here as well as 2020’s Getting Into Knives. This makes for a much more energetic record and one that’s simply more fun to listen to; the tracks “Wage Wars Get Rich Die Handsome” and “Make You Suffer” are arguably some of the most “fun” tracks in the band’s entire discography.

As entertaining as this album is though, it is by no means the most profound in The Mountain Goats’ catalog. Fans of the band know that Darnielle is perhaps most well known for his more raw and poignant lyrics, usually concerning heavy topics like mental illness, abuse, and addiction (all things that Darnielle himself has experienced in his lifetime). While Bleed Out does hint at some deeper underlying social and political themes such as gun violence, as Darnielle mentions in an interview with The Vulture, the record’s main attraction is its appeal to action fanatics and its shift to a more rock-driven sound.

That being said, I had the pleasure of seeing the Goats live on their Bleed Out tour in Baltimore, and their high-energy performances of these new songs really helped me appreciate the record on a whole new level. When I heard the tracks played live, I felt like I had heard them in their purest form, maybe more so than even the studio versions. The last song of the night, “Training Montage”, had the whole crowd bouncing up and down after nearly two full hours of music, and in that moment it felt like a Mountain Goats staple. The show was an absolute blast, and these songs were a big part of it.

Another possible exception to the purely amusing quality of this record is its title track. While “Bleed Out” could easily be seen as simply a more scaled-back conclusion to the album, I suspect that Darnielle could be sending a message to his critics with this song. “Every time they knock me down / I rise to my feet.” With these lines, Darnielle remains adamantly unapologetic for his quirky obsessions, his prolificity, and all the other elements that make him one of the most unique songwriters alive. “I’m gonna bleed out” could very well translate to “I’m gonna keep doing what I’m doing, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”

At the end of the day, Bleed Out gets firmly planted in The Mountain Goats’ catalog and distinguishes itself as one of their most engaging and appealing records. On the song “Hostages”, Darnielle sings, “When you know you’ll never make it out alive / You kind of get to live out your dream”. At this point in his career, John Darnielle’s reputation as a songwriter and the band’s cult-like following have given him the ability to do just that, and he’s been doing it like no one else for decades.