Movie Music (Sort Of)

Usually I don’t care much about lyrics (he said with a guilty cough). It’s sounds, textures & rhythms that catch my ears & my heart, and when I need to hear something, it’s likely to be closer to “Louie Louie” than to, say, midperiod Elvis Costello. I’ve loved plenty of songs for their, er, songness even as the lyrics have made me wince (hello, Luna), but the reverse has never been the case. No matter how wise or witty the words are, if it ain’t got that swing I’d rather just be reading Philip Larkin or Peter Van Toorn.

But I’m not so much the fool or posturer as to insist that words don’t matter at all. My fave record of the year so far is probably Destroyer’s Rubies, both because of its skewed classic-rockisms and because it always keeps me listening closely to whatever it is he’s going on about.

And sometimes words just make me shiver, and this song is one of those times. In just a few lines Mountain Goat John Darnielle gives his title character (one of the evil beasts from Beowulf) a voice, a deep sadness, a vague fear, and a cold rage, and marries it all to chord changes so archetypal that you could almost believe they were passed down through the centuries along with the original epic poem.

• The Mountain Goats, “Grendel’s Mother”
  

All this has been on my mind because I’ve just seen the disappointing Beowulf and Grendel movie. The writer & director tried to add some context and backstory to make it all less good-vs-evil and more nuanced, which I certainly support in theory (love John Gardner’s novel Grendel, after all), but here it was clumsily done. Add a low-budget feel and some erratic acting (hello, Sarah Polley), and ultimately the movie seemed like a lifeless muddle with some nice shots here & there.

But enough about that. I’ll leave you with some lines from Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf that set up Darnielle’s song: “Grendel’s mother, monstrous hell-bride, brooded on her wrongs…. [she] had sallied forth on a savage journey, grief-racked and ravenous, desperate for revenge.”