John Darnielle isn’t your usual indie rocker. He named his fuzzy grey cat after hockey player Wayne Gretzky. He finds pleasure in his latest hobby — quilt-making. He uses big words like quotidian and logorrheic. Get him talking about death metal and he’ll talk for hours. “When you hear the guitar solo, you’re gonna see God,” he says, as he headbangs and plays air guitar to an energized song soaked in teeth-shattering distortion. “It’s 12 different heavy metal guitarists trading licks, and they’re all at the top of their game, making money and doing a lot of cocaine.”Darnielle is the man behind the Mountain Goats, a one-man band that has reached audiences from Idaho to Ireland. In a sense, he is Ames’ secret claim to fame — a hip, cutting-edge songwriter with an international cult following. We’re sitting Indian style on the hardwood floor of Darnielle’s West Ames house, sipping red wine and eating Hershey’s chocolate, chatting nonstop about music, underground culture and everything music geeks like to talk about. The song he’s rocking out to is by heavy metal supergroup Hear ‘n Aid, a 1985 charity project created to raise money for famine relief in Africa. “A lot of the best bands right now are metal bands,” he says, rattling off the names of obscure groups such as Rotting Corpse, Iron Savior and Pissing Razors. He isn’t joking, either. This is coming from a 10-year veteran of the American indie rock scene — not exactly an acne-faced teenager with a mullet and a Megadeth t-shirt. But his passion for death metal is what landed Darnielle a columnist job for Spin magazine online. “I have no guilt at all about metal,” he says. “If it is a pleasure you shouldn’t feel guilty about it.”Darnielle’s house is small, but cozy. The place is crawling with books and magazines from both mainstream and underground press. Nearly every room is scattered with music — vinyl, audio tapes — in his kitchen, he’s got a refrigerator-sized cabinet filled with CDs. He’s lived here since the summer of 1999 when he moved to Ames with his wife, who plays for the Iowa State women’s hockey team. Though he’s originally from California, Darnielle first came to Iowa in 1996 when his wife enrolled in grad school at Grinnell College. The Mountain Goats’ music isn’t metal to say the least. It’s not even a close relative. It is quiet, melodic and introspective. Essentially, it’s acoustic indie folk, which may seem like the antithesis of the heavy metal Darnielle admires, but actually packs a lot of the same energy. Conceived almost entirely in Iowa, the Mountain Goats’ newest album, “The Coroner’s Gambit,” is raw and edgy, filled with fictional stories of love, life and death. “It’s a darker album,” Darnielle explains. “It’s mainly songs about death. I always try to be dark in some way or another but … the humor on this record is really dark and it takes four or five listens to really see that it’s kinda funny.”Like his other albums, it was entirely recorded at home using technology as simple as a boombox from the 1980s.

“That machine right there, that’s my recording studio,” Darnielle says as he points to a small, $50-valued Panasonic boombox sitting in the corner. “It’s primitive. My entire career is that box.”He pulls out a shoebox loaded with 19 filled-to-capacity audio tapes. These are just a portion of Darnielle’s back catalog of recorded music, which he estimates to include more than 400 songs. How does he record? To put it bluntly he tilts the boombox, balancing it against a book, hits the record button and lets the music rip.The result is a refreshingly rough sound, one that many have labeled “lo-fi.” “In the early ’90s it was an almost political gesture,” Darnielle explains. “There was a whole movement around recording simply and easily and focusing more on the material and the way it sounded … But then that got called the lo-fi movement.”American bands with the lo-fi sound started gigging in Europe, where the genre became so trendy, some critics dubbed it the next big thing — the first significant musical movement since Nirvana’s grunge era. “[After releasing] the early cassettes, I got letters from Germany,” Darnielle says. “They were just out there and people would write to me from Germany or France and say ‘I got your cassette, I really liked it.’ It’s a real community, a natural community of like-minded people.” Until 1993, Darnielle’s recordings were all released on audio tape, then he wowed critics with his debut full-length CD, “Zopilote Machine,” which won a spot on Spin magazine’s “10 Best Albums of the Year You Didn’t Hear [1993].””It’s nice,” Darnielle says of the praise he’s gotten from the mainstream music press. “It’s really validating ’cause I work my ass off on this stuff. A lot of people think that what I’m doing is just sorta making something up and doing it right away, getting it out and moving it right along.”On the contrary, Darnielle says sometimes he spends as much as eight hours on a single song, just to get the recording right. In the mid-’90s, when Darnielle was doing music as a full-time job, he toured six months out of the year. Now, he’s pretty much toned it down, spending most of the year living in Ames and working with kids at the Beloit Children’s Home. It’s tough to be an indie rocker in Central Iowa. Darnielle can attest to that. Not as many bands slide through town, live music options can sometimes be slim, and records hard to find. It’s the quiet, anonymity of Iowa that appeals to the Mountain Goats. Ames is not tainted by the buzz of a big-city music scene. “Once you’re addicted to any sort of creative endeavor, it becomes painfully clear that if you die broke and 20 years early, if you made good art, then it doesn’t matter that your life is miserable and died early, Darnielle says. “I like [living in Iowa]. I wouldn’t really be here if I didn’t really like Iowa a lot. I like my garden, I like the people, and I like the fact that there’s no scene,” he adds. “The reason that ‘The Coroner’s Gambit’ is my best album by a country mile is that I am not surrounded by any scene at all. I was working free of any constraints that are imposed on you by being involved in a scene. “When you’re working here, it’s just you and your thoughts — nobody else cares.”