In the wake of John Darnielle's last three albums ("We Shall All Be Healed," "The Sunset Tree" and "Get Lonely"), which are filled with songs about John Darnielle, The Mountain Goats [ tickets ] leader (and realistically, only member who matters) returns with "Heretic Pride," a record filled with songs about people other than John Darnielle.

This is a point of importance when viewing Darnielle's work because a Mountain Goats record, more than anything else, is about the explicit process of seeing what Darnielle sees.

When the singer decided to make public explicit details of his personal life on his previous three LPs--a life gone unexpectedly somber after a career filled with delightful and amusing invention--many fans found it almost too much to bear, like watching Mr. Rogers walk away from the television camera and sob mournfully into his hands.

Fortunately, whatever ails Darnielle on the three autobiographical sets presumably is behind him, or at least not as apparent , because "Heretic Pride" puts the listener firmly back in a normal Mountain Goats dimension, which means that there are songs here about swamp creatures, H.P. Lovecraft and little-known reggae heroes from the 1970s. Which is as it should be.

If Darnielle is entrenching himself in completely familiar territory on songs like "Autoclave" (about "people whose hearts involuntarily pulverize any good feelings that come within a block of them," according to the helpful song-by-song explanation-by-way-of-comic-book that came with the album's press kit) and "Craters on the Moon" (which finds some of Darnielle's characters gathered in a room "waiting for some unspecified disaster"), he is at least doing what he knows and doing it well.

Constructed with the assistance of the only other official Mountain Goat, Peter Hughes, and some key help from able sidemen (John Vanderslice, Superchunk's Jon Wurster), "Heretic Pride" is, more then anything, a document about Darnielle stepping back from the brink, ready to resume his journey at the same point he left it.

Musically, "Heretic Pride" continues Darnielle's evolving slide into pedestrianism; nothing on this document is specifically designed to excite you, sonically, and nothing terribly leaves an impression. This is music you'll hum while driving, but you won't remember where you heard it. Since it's all about providing framework and context for the stories issuing forth out of Darnielle's weirdly ageless voice, the lack of musical drive is not as big of a problem as it should be. We're not here to dance, exactly.

And if songs about alienated lovers ("So Desperate") and imaginary mystery cults ("New Zion") don't tell us anything new about John Darnielle, all the better to inform us through the small victories and unpleasant circumstances of the cast of fake people who live under his skin, and frequently bubble to the surface, for the amusement of the real people who welcome their return.