Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan

Peter Balkan sounds like he should be a minor celebrity, a major figure in Mountain Goats’ lore, or both. In fact, he’s a recent figment of John Darnielle’s imagination, a name that appeared to him in a dream along with the title of his band’s 23rd album, which coalesces around a narrative about an imperiled sea voyage that leaves three survivors stranded on a beach. This self-contained tale about endings, deprivation, and subsistence without hope gestures toward rising sea levels and humanity’s helplessness as the 21st Century unravels. During these ominous times, Darnielle’s most intimate record in years feels like his most universal.

It also happens to be the Mountain Goats’ most gleefully arranged outing since Darnielle began the project as a solo artist in 1991. Pedal steel, woodwinds, and strings abound, thanks in part to the maximalist bent of multi-instrumentalist Matt Douglas, who plays foil to Darnielle’s literary strain. This juxtaposition of instrumentation and lyrics is hardly ironic: The trio of seamen at Through This Fire’s center are delirious from running on fumes as well as starvation and injury, and their song cycle—billed as Darnielle’s too-macabre-for-Broadway “musical”—reaches for uplift. Lin-Manuel Miranda shows up to sing backing vocals on several tracks, which isn’t such a stretch on an album with an orchestral opener called “Overture” followed by a number, “Fishing Boat” that sets the scene and the showtune tone: “Free as the wind on the ocean/Wild as the rain in the storm.” Miranda’s contributions are so trifling that even Hamilton diehards might mistake him for just another Mountain Goat. He doesn’t need to be there: Darnielle’s three-act knack was already evident without a feeble cosign from a megastar responsible for a revisionist history as troubling as it is famous.

The thespian framing results in an unusually linear Mountain Goats record full of powerful moments that not even the eternally moving Darnielle can scrape into the whole it deserves. Devastating, doomed couplets abound: “Nobody thought to carry a compass/It’s not the 19th century anymore,” he quips; and later, “You were already talking when I woke up today/For a man on combat rations, you sure do find a lot to say.” Flute, clarinet, and French horn bring a disarming warmth, while percussionist Jon Wurster plays on many of the cuts as if caught in an endless drum fill, his heavy use of toms evoking another theatrical opus, Lou Reed’s cracked 1973 masterpiece Berlin.

When one of the remaining members of the crew—Adam, his name a wicked twist on biblical allusion—walks into the sea and drowns himself on “Rocks in my Pocket,” the pathos is wrenching: “Some people name their cars or their guitars,” he comments on the eponymous stones, “Some things are too fragile to name.” Ditto when the album’s unnamed, 16-year-old protagonist asks Peter Balkan, “Will you lie still while I reapply your bandage?” Darnielle shows the thinness of the line between rite of passage and funeral rite. We’re made to think of how global warming-related disasters instantaneously transform hum-drum lives into mortal battles with nature. “It’s time for you to go/But you never lost your glow,” Darnielle laments in the stirring “Your Glow,” which he expands to encompass the whole globe: “If there’s nothing left but water/Then let water be enough.” The human spirit preserves, just as the world will keep turning in the absence of people.

This conceit is weighty, sometimes profound, and also pat for a songwriter who has created towering dramas with more quotidian stakes —the aging of the counterculture, which he depicted with exceptional poignance on 2015’s Goths, or the horror of living with an abusive stepfather, a theme that courses through 2005’s classic The Sunset Tree. These works are sinuous, robust and thick with implication, while Through This Fire proceeds with event after event, and even as Darnielle’s words cut to the quick, we feel as if his songcraft glides across the surface. Take closer “Broken to Begin With,” with its swelling guitar solo that echoes his friends in the Hold Steady. Presumably in the waning minutes of his existence on earth, the adolescent speaker pictures his campsite discovered in years to come by “Men of old who sailed the seas.” The notion of a civilization destroying itself to rise again in a pre-industrial mode is crushingly resonant, but its exploration of the mysteries of existence feels too predetermined. An abrupt restatement of the chorus of “Cold At Night” finishes the LP and only contributes to its overall air of slightness. Through This Fire seems confused about whether it wants to reach for miniaturist genius or ambitious sweep—the Mountain Goats managed to achieve both in the past.

On occasion, Darnielle allows us to reach for our own connections, rather than setting them in our hands, wrapped in wisdom and a perfect sense of meter. “Everything that sinks will float,” he repeats in his relentless sing-song on “The Lady From Shanghai 2.” This statement envisions a poetic fate for the corpses of lost sailors, but it also resuscitates a memorable tidbit for fans: on the band’s last record, 2023’s Jenny From Thebes, the titular character, a woman devoted to protecting the threatened outcasts of West Texas, murders a ne’er-do-well landlord, stores his body in a water tower, and then sets him free, to “float downstream.” Death may be inevitable, but Darnielle casts out lifelines in his work, rescuing old motifs in order to refuse simple interpretations, tidy conclusions, and despair. And so his practice feels bottomless, while Through This Fire pushes ever forward as if its author had a destination in mind when he began the journey of writing. Such unswerving momentum is a mistake for which his immense skill can only partially compensate. The ocean, after all, is not just wide, it’s deep.