Cascadia Calling, 2025.11.03
"the ocean is faithful and the devil's a liar"
I spent last week acquiring and then recovering from two injuries. On Monday evening I sprained my ankle badly. It’s still stiff, but I can walk on it. On Tuesday I lost a fight with a vegetable peeler so badly I had to go to urgent care to get my finger to stop bleeding. I’m still covering it with bandages which make typing a minor annoyance, but it will take more than minor annoyance to keep me from my weighty duties as an amateur art critic.
Being on the blogger Injured List isn’t the only reason my column is late this week. I got my vinyl of Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan, mid-week and, after listening to it, realized I couldn’t write about anything else until I’d written about this weird little shipwreck story that the Mountain Goats had dropped on me.
I’ll dispense with the obvious commentary that anyone can glean from listening to the singles: “Cold at Night” is an all-time Mountain Goats hall-of-famer. Up there with “This Year” in terms of its blend of grim circumstance and clear-eyed commitment to survival. If you’re reading this before the record comes out, do yourself a favor and give it a listen. But stop there. Don’t listen to any other tracks in isolation.
It’s tempting to say Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan is a natural progression of the Mountain Goats’ theme-album era. That would be a mistake. There’s no loose theming here, but rather a clear plot laid out in both liner note and exegetic detail. The band (I presume John Darnielle, the primary motive force behind the Mountain Goats) has described the album as a “full-on musical”. It certainly has the makings of one. There’s an overture, a brief reprise of the headline tune to close the show, the absurd presence of Lin-Manuel Miranda haunting several tracks, etc. Those things alone, though, wouldn’t have caused me to accuse it of being a musical. There are no belting Broadway choruses. None of the tracks could plausibly back any big choreography. These aren’t so much show-tunes as introspective, apocalyptic Mountain Goats tracks stretched across the bones of a musical that washed ashore after a storm.
The best fusion of the Mountain Goats’ eclectic, occultic style and the conceit of this being a musical is the track “Dawn of Revelation”. A spitting, agressively end-rhymed vision of an apocalyptic, pelagic dissolution. It grows into choral wailing and gnashing guitars with Darnielle ecstatic in the role of grinning shipwrecked prophet. It feels both the most theatrical and the most like a classic Mountain Goats song, all at the same time.
The semi-titular “Through This Fire” also shows the faint marks of coming from a musical, both in its soft horns and its plaintive, punchline of a chorus. It serves as the closest thing to a love song that the album has. It’s sung, in classic grim Darniellean empathy, to a man slowly dying across from the nameless narrator. It closes the arc of the mad prophet and plunges the last of the album into reflective isolation.
This is an interesting era to be releasing such a linear album. Its narrative structure (complete with motif-setting overture) is a repudiation of track-by-track streaming and the tyranny of the three-minute Spotify Single. I’m glad I listened to it on vinyl the first time, not for any audiophillic reason, but because the ritual and the rigid enforcement of album order locked me into the story. It meant that I could appreciate the foreshadowing and reprises and trace themes and motifs, which were great rewards for subsequent careful relistening. I doubt Darnielle and company intended Through This Fire… as a rebuke of streaming culture, but it does serve as a nice counterpoint.1
The record is notable for the absence of Peter Hughes, to whom the album is dedicated. As a Peter Hughes obsessive (I still defend Fangio as a great record and a seminal influence on MG’s turn to the thematic), there’s a sonic and spiritual gap where his striding, thumping bass should be. It might just be that I’m someone who owns a bass primarily because of Peter Hughes’ bass lines on Heretic Pride, but Through This Fire Across from Peter Balkan seems tamer and less bold because of his exit from the band. This isn’t to say that Cameron Ralston does a poor job on the record. Quite the contrary, I like the bass parts when they’re more present, but they don’t provide the motive force they have on past albums. It’s also notable that the two tracks where the lower end seem most like previous full-band Mountain Goats albums are “Cold at Night” and “Dawn of Revelation” which both feature Tommy Stinson (of The Replacements) on bass.
It’s hard to know what to say about the twenty-third album from a band I love. A band that I’ve seen play live over a dozen times. A band that changed my life and my understanding of modern music. So I’ll just say that I’m glad they’re still creating weird, big-hearted stories, and that whatever format their next adventurous album takes, I will happily climb aboard.
It also made this review take longer to write. I hadn’t quite realized how much I’ve come to rely on scrubbing through tracks or replaying them in isolation when I’m writing about music. The process of writing this column was meaningfully different than others because I had to get up to flip the record or to restart a side.