Recap The Mountain Goats at the Portage Theatre

If Wednesday night’s Mountain Goats show at the Portage Theatre had a theme, it was tongue-in-cheek musical theater. Drawing, perhaps, on the austere setting of the Portage Theatre, Mountain Goats frontman and driving force John Darnielle made his entrance in full Phantom Of The Opera getup, complete with flowing black cape, Spanish gaucho hat, and a white mask covering the right side of his face. "You think you're going to be all cool", he told the crowd, "but then you realize you can't wear your glasses with this mask." He then opened his set with the title song from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Tell Me On A Sunday, which concert-goers seemed to assume was an older Goats song they didn't recognize. Earlier, opener John Vanderslice had suggested that the crowd warm-up with five minutes of Riverdance, which he then eagerly demonstrated. While all the pomp and circumstance of a musical may have been at odds with the stripped-down nature of this tour—both Vanderslice and Darnielle play acoustic guitar with no backing band—it set the tone for a night of music that would never take itself too seriously.

The Mountain Goats' shows tend to be like an episode of VH1 Storytellers, but in the best way possible. Darnielle introduces almost every song with stories both relevant and less so. He introduced “Lovecraft In Brooklyn” from last year’s Heretic Pride by describing the deep, dark sub-sub-basement in which he wrote it, while the intro to “See America Right” included a long, funny ramble about Darnielle’s penchant for watching Law And Order: SVU alone in his home, as well as his respect for Mariska Haritgay's charity, which he said flies victims of abuse to Hawaii to swim with dolphins.

Darnielle’s set dug deep into his back catalogue, from his earliest tapes to the just-released EP Moon Colony Bloodbath, a concept album about cannibalism and a covert, government-run organ-harvesting program on the Moon. Vanderslice, who recorded the EP with The Mountain Goats, joined Darnielle onstage for two tracks from the new album in addition to “See America Right” and fan favorite “This Year”. Even as a full band (Darnielle is usually backed by a drummer and longtime collaborator Peter Hughes on guitar or bass), The Mountain Goats have always had a one-guy-and-his-guitar feel, so most songs didn't suffer or even change that noticeably by receiving the solo treatment, especially when Darnielle invited the crowd to sing along on "This Year" and encore "No Children."

Despite the showy entrance, The Mountain Goats' set was slow to pick up. After "Tell Me On A Sunday," Darnielle played “Collapsing Stars,” “Woke Up New,” and a couple of cuts from what are commonly referred to as his "old tapes"—songs he recorded on a boombox in the mid-'90s and released on his friends' cassette-tape label. Things didn’t really get going until the intro of “International Small Arms Traffic Blues,” when, with no prompting, an audience member got out of his seat and stood at the foot of the stage. A small trickle of people followed, and, after some urging from Darinelle, everyone in the theater eventually stood up and crowded towards the front, giving the show a much more intimate feel in the Portage's cavernous auditorium. It was then that Darnielle seemed to enjoy himself, keeping up his near-constant banter with a razor-sharp wit and near-monotone Mitch Hedburg-esque delivery. His best of line of the night was a sarcastic, “There are 1,100 of you in here. So please, let’s hear those requests.” The joy Darnielle felt in playing the songs, new and old, was palpable, and after a brief one-song encore (which he blamed on Chicago's curfew laws), he seemed just as reluctant as the crowd was to call it a night.