PrettyFakes

—The Mountain Goats, “Moon Over Goldsboro,” Get Lonely

No one can ever accuse John Darnielle of selling out.

The Mountain Goats’ public profile has been waxing over the last few albums, what with the adoring profiles on NPR and in The New Yorker to supplement the widespread fervor of blogs and indie ‘zines. It would have been easy for Darnielle to put out an album of (as one of his song series has it) Standard Bitter Love Songs and coast by on his lyrical wit and compelling performances—in studio and out—without much varying the formula. So, to release an album likely to be so initially alienating to an audience that includes a larger than average proportion of people who don’t know all the words to “Going to Georgia” is a pretty bold move.

I’ve been anxious about Get Lonely for a while. I kept reading that it was a “root fire” of a record, that it was contemplative and introspective, that it was quiet and that it demanded patience to enjoy fully. I worried that all this pre-release buzz was really a calculated PR campaign whose real point was to deflect criticism from what was in fact a boring, monotonous album. My fears only increased when I heard Darnielle play a version of “Alpha Omega” on KEXP the other day that was slowed down to the point of shapelessness, the guitar seeming to follow Darnielle’s vocals aimlessly; it would be easy to think of the guitar in a song like “Alpha Omega” to be so simple as to be inconsequential and incidental, but this performance demonstrated the error of such thinking. I feared the worst.

Thankfully, my fears proved largely unfounded. All the descriptions circulating pre-release were mostly accurate. It is one of the most tonally consistent items in the Mountain Goats catalog: The dominant image is of a man stumbling around in a daze. This is intercut with images of a man stumbling around in a fog, and, occasionally, in a haze. But while there are a few dead spots here and there, Get Lonely gradually reveals itself to be a much more richly textured and varied album than is immediately apparent on first listen.

Last year’s The Sunset Tree ranged from the whispers of “Dinu Lipatti’s Bones” to the shout-along catharsis of “This Year” or “Up the Wolves,” but Get Lonely mostly confines itself to the whispery end of that spectrum. However, the album’s persistent quietude makes clear that even a brief respite from pain can be indistinguishable from actual joy. For me, the album clicked into place with “Moon Over Goldsboro,” a clear highlight and one of several songs that find their narrators stretched out in tall grass, striving to alleviate their loneliness by losing themselves in the landscape. I don’t know of another song that so perfectly evokes the loneliness of the noise from a high school football stadium heard from a great distance, so bonus points for that.

“If You See the Light,” another standout, is downright upbeat and features horns and a desperate, theatrical vocal performance from Darnielle. Coming along near the album, just after “Woke Up New,” whose narrator is “ready for the future to arrive,” “If You See the Light” holds out the brief and tantalizing promise of some sort of movement that isn’t simply more pacing in a circle, but it’s followed by one of the most static tracks on the album—”Cobra Tattoo.” I have to think this is on purpose, a deliberate flaunting of our listener’s desire to cut that well worn circle in half and make a neat narrative arc out of it. In the final song, “In Corolla,” the narrator decides to escape an existence in which, he says, “I leave a trail of burned things in my wake / every single place I go” by taking a long walk in the marsh, “Desiree’s Baby”-style, thus offering a grim answer to the question posed in “If You See the Light”: “where is there left for poor sinners to go?” I hold the groundless and naïve hope that he’s not dead, but given the mockery I’ve privately doled out to students who felt the same way about Desiree, I should really know better.

So, here’s something that I’ve been thinking about: with the overtly autobiographical The Sunset Tree and now this quiet singer-songwriter platter full of first-person lost-love songs, The Mountain Goats, at their moment of greatest public visibility and greatest commercial viability, have put out a pair of albums that are very much in the mold of the sorts of albums that people used to mistakenly think the Mountain Goats made. Darnielle has spent much time and energy inveighing against the traditional stereotype of what a singer-songwriter can do or be. Here he is in 1998 on just this subject, from the liner notes of a scrubbed re-release of Zopilote Machine, the first full-length Mountain Goats record, which included many songs about people and things who were clearly not Darnielle:

The other allegation levelled against these songs was the old saw about one man baring his soul, etc. I have spent the last five years waging war against such facile, reductive, post-romantic descriptions of what it is that songwriters do, but since the war has proven futile, to hell with it: these songs are all pages ripped from my diary, which drips blood. I have been alive for over 2000 years and routinely stalk those who have made me feel vulnerable. I was born in at least seven different countries. If I am not omnipotent then I am at least superhuman. I am incapable of understanding the viewpoints of other sentient beings and will take anything ever said to me as a direct personal threat. None of these songs were written. They are all spontaneous eruptions of directly experienced personal pain, deeply felt and wholly unvanquishable. Each time I sing any one of them I further aggravate a wound which will never heal.

None of this was ever true, of course, but it will be easier to swallow for those unwilling to stomach the inverse proposition and what it suggests about every encounter we’ve ever had with any song that moved us. Which was, if you’ve made it this far, the point in the first place.

The rest of it is here. Also, you should totally buy Zopliote Machine.

I find this reversal, if reversal it indeed is, striking. After all, now the newest members of the Mountain Goats’ swelling audience will listen backwards from these albums to the earlier ones, so that, for instance, “Cao Dai Blowout” will have never been a moving work of imagination and will always have been instead about Darnielle’s abusive stepdad. Etc etc. You get the idea.

I wonder if maybe he’s actually banking on that mishearing. Darnielle is an avowed lover of the obscure, of the romance of the missing masterpiece, of secret songs and private recordings, lost albums. One imagines he was immensely frustrated, though not at all surprised, by the leak of his own “lost album,” Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg, earlier this year, which is a perfectly okay album but can never match the version that was in our minds. So, I’m tempted to read the last two official Mountain Goats albums as Darnielle’s stashing his canon in the fabric of misperception. That is, if it’s not possible to keep the songs themselves private anymore, then perhaps all that’s left is to keep the truest experience of them private, to obscure and distort our hearing of them unless we pay very, very close attention.

This is, of course, a lousy theory and one that enables the most virulent strain of narcissistic indie snob obscurantism—“Oh, if you only heard ‘Pseudorhythm Song’ after you heard Sunset Tree, then you NEVER REALLY HEARD IT, and you NEVER CAN. ONLY I CAN. YOU MAY NIBBLE AT THE CRUMBS THAT FALL FROM MY MOUSTACHE AS I SHAKE MY HEAD AT YOU IN PITY AND CONTEMPT.” And so on. More likely, Darnielle’s ideas about the whys and wherefores of making music have evolved right along with his sonic aesthetics. And I, for one, am interested to see what shape he next assumes.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006 at 3:35 pm and is filed under Professor Fury, The Rock and The Roll. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.