A couple of months ago, John Darnielle published a book about darkness. Universal Harvester is either the Mountain Goats frontman's second novel or his third, depending on how you define his entirely fictional (and great) 33 1/3 book about Black Sabbath's Master Of Reality. And it's some heavy shit. Universal Harvester takes place in small Iowa towns and in the spaces in-between them, and it concerns the strange and ambiguous and dangerous things that can happen out there in the cornfields, where nobody is looking, where nobody would even know where to start looking if they knew to look in the first place. It's a book that's less about plot and more about a tingly and uneasy feeling. So I wonder if it was a relief to write an album about the performance of darkness, about self-consciously disappearing into a cave when outside it's 92 degrees and KROQ is playing Siouxsie And The Banshees. Because that's what Goths, the new Mountain Goats album, is.