‘Beat the Champ’
John Darnielle, the founder, lead singer, lyricist and bleeding heart of The Mountain Goats, is a storyteller first and foremost. In his catalog of now 15 albums, numerous EPs, compilations, side projects and unreleased singles, Darnielle has told stories about love (in all its good and bad forms), outsiders, the devil, Jimi Hendrix, peanuts, Michael Myers, an alcoholic couple and hundreds of other topics and characters. Beat the Champ is the band’s latest effort — this time about the world of professional wrestling.
The young Darnielle went to wrestling matches with his abusive stepfather, taking in the frenzied violence, theatricality and defined sense of good and evil. Wrestlers are either faces (the good guys) or heels (the bad guys), and watching the heroic father figures such as Chavo Guerrero trounce their enemies gave Darnielle some semblance of the justice he couldn’t find in his own battles against his evil heel. Beat the Champ is an ode to those men, fighting under masks and narratives but still fighting all the same. These songs are love letters to the heroic faces of Darnielle’s youth (“The Legend of Chavo Guerrero” and “The Ballad of Bull Ramos”), raucous frenzies from the more crazed and eccentric heels (“Choked Out,” “Werewolf Gimmick”), and quiet meditations on the struggles of these “nameless bodies in unremembered rooms” (“Luna,” “Unmasked!,” etc.).
While The Mountain Goats always have and likely always will stick to “conventional songwriting” of several verses, choruses, a bridge and the like, Beat the Champ finds the band continuing its recent evolution into new sounds. “Foreign Object” is a hilariously violent sax-backed romp with a chorus of “I personally will stab you in the eye with a foreign object.” This is followed by the twangy guitar of “Animal Mask,” while “Werewolf Gimmick” features a gleefully manic Darnielle shouting, amid a thundering roll of drums, “Know how a man becomes a beast when the wolfbane blooms!” Even the low-key album opener “Southwestern Territory” features what sounds like the oboes from a musical pit band, adding a layer of theatricality to the entire album.
Beat the Champ is The Mountain Goats’ 15th studio album, and while Darnielle is no stranger to the concept album, this one is the most thematically unified since 2005’s The Sunset Tree (about his youth with an abusive stepfather). While there are welcome glimpses of the real Darnielle in “The Legend of Chavo Guerrero,” which chronicles the young Darnielle’s childhood admiration for an obscure wrestler, most of the album centers on these fighters and their distinct challenges and quirks. Some grow old and die happy among family and friends, as in “The Ballad of Bull Ramos,” while others are stabbed to death outside San Juan, as in the appropriately-titled “Stabbed to Death Outside San Juan.”
Yet perhaps the truest and most gut-wrenching moment of empathy for these fighters comes with the album’s closer, “Hair Match.” In some high-stakes wrestling matches, the fighters will pledge to cut their long hair (a symbol of their status) if they lose. The protagonist of “Hair Match” is strapped to a chair and must simply stare out into the waves of fans and onlookers, so eager to watch his life fall apart. “We’ll stipulate that there will be no cameras filming/ But of course there will be several in the building” is just one of many cutting lines that spell doom for the unlucky fighter.
More than just clever lyrics and interesting stories, Beat the Champ succeeds as one of the most blatant examples of John Darnielle’s defining songwriting characteristic — empathy. He’s written songs about nearly every type of person, including several creatures and monsters, and there’s really no living songwriter so capable of getting you to understand the pathos inherent in every person’s life. Yes, wrestlers are large and violent and spend their lives “faking it,” but they’re people too, listening to the adulations or venomous hatred of the crowd, fully aware of how the two can change if those on high say their characters need to change.
These wrestlers will never have true fame, and most will die injured on the side of a road, wondering what it was all for. Yet some, like Chavo Guerrero, live on in both body and the hearts of everyone they inspired. Of course Darnielle says it better than anyone: “I don’t know if that’s true, but I’ve been told/ It’s real sweet to grow old.” Beat the Champ is one of the best Mountain Goats records in years for anyone willing to slip inside the minds behind the brightly colored masks.
