“I am always happy to go up against the rockingest four-piece anybody’s got – I will rock them tooth for tooth.” These are fighting words from John Darnielle, head Mountain Goat. After a tour scheduled for April was postponed for medical reasons, he is rearing to go as he looks forward to returning to Australia in December.

“You guys haven’t seen us with Mr. Wurster yet, it is so much fun,” he enthuses. He’s referring to drummer Jon Wurster, who will make his first Australian appearances with Darnielle and bassist Peter Hughes. “I consider what we do a rock show whether there’s one or two or three of us – that’s always been a big thing of mine…But that said, yeah, I mean, Wurster is a drummer’s drummer. He pounds – œem hard enough to draw blood, so yes, it gets pretty sweaty and awesome nowadays.”

This may be the first Mountain Goats tour to feature this beefed-up line-up, but the group’s history is long and distinguished. For years, Darnielle fashioned a niche as one of the most singular songwriters in indie rock, his lo-fi narratives and prolific output earning him a cult following. On underground classics like Sweden and the concept record Tallahassee, Darnielle’s distinctive, raspy voice described characters on the margins with compassion and honesty.

The breakthrough album, however, was The Sunset Tree, a deeply personal record of magnetic passion and compelling urgency which provided indie-folk anthems such as This Year and Dance Music. Subsequent records Get Lonely and Heretic Pride have continued in this raw-boned vein, with critics detecting an increasing tendency towards surrealism in his writing. Darnielle agrees this tradition may be an influence but notes a lot of surrealist poetry is “rough going”, difficult and dense. “I hope my songs go down easy, [so] that a person doesn’t need a dictionary of symbols to get through them. But I am drawn to strange images for sure.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly for one whose lyrics are inevitably described as – œliterary’, Darnielle wrote his first book this year, a novella centering on Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality. It has since been released as part of the consistently excellent 33 1/3 series. Darnielle has been gratified with the response to the book. “More than I can say, really – people have reacted strongly to it, emotionally, which, you know, it was an emotional book to write.” The success of the short novel has also seen him acquire a literary agent, and he is currently working on another title, which he describes as “quite a bit darker.”

His reading list continues this penchant for the darker shades of literature, with the downbeat New Yorker Stanley Elkin and the controversial Novel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek (“Boy, are her books depressing!”) amongst his current enthusiasms. He also recommends Patik Ourdenik’s Europeana (“a work of total genius”), which he describes as “a history of the twentieth century told just in raw data, really hilarious and tragic and ridiculous and heartbreaking all at the same time.”

That last sentence could serve as a description of Darnielle’s own art. His live shows in particular etch themselves indelibly in one’s memory. Despite the often harrowing subject matter of his songs, the shows are invariably marked by humour and warmth. “It doesn’t really matter what the subject is,” he opines, “music tends to elevate even when it drowns you…I listen to all kinds of gory downer depressing stuff but even when it reduces me to tears, I feel uplifted by the process.”

The Mountain Goats play the following shows in December.

Fri 5 – Manning Bar, Sydney
Sat 6 – Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle
Sun 7 – Fowler’s Live, Adelaide
Tues 9 – Rosemount Hotel, Perth
Wed 10 – Billboard, Melbourne
Fri 12 – Republic Bar & Cafe, Hobart
Sat 13 – Meredith Music Festival
Sun 14 – The Zoo, Brisbane