The Mountain Goats: Get Lonely (2006)

(4AD)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

John Darnielle can seem invincibly guarded even when he's narrating the traumas of his own past, as on the albums We Shall All Be Healed and The Sunset Tree, which are about addiction and abuse respectively. It's not a criticism, it's just what you'd expect from somebody who ended up writing NYT bestselling novels and hosting a podcast in which he almost comically refuses to reveal much of anything significant about his work. Somehow it puts him in a category with a songwriter he strongly dislikes, Ray Davies, whose acerbic treatments of everyday characters' plights didn't deny or escape emotion but did intellectualize it in a way that his legions and now generations of nerdy fans found deeply understandable. The Kinks' records were like an Ealing Studios black comedy -- they attained warmth from their refusal to admit their humanity, and therefore became oddly moving to those of us who are hesitant to flail our arms so wildly that someone might see us. Mountain Goats records, meanwhile, can have the therapeutic distance of an author like William Wharton, whose litany of vividly recalled miseries is approached through a certain comfort of literary abstraction; they are broken but emotionally healthy, the sound of someone who knew when he needed help and got it, but never forgot a moment of what took him there.

Like Davies, Darnielle also delights -- in much of his discography -- in the thrill and shock of something you might term escapist cynicism. Without subsuming himself in a life of rude misanthropy, he nevertheless knows misanthropy's language and delights in its button-pushing capability. His signature song "No Children" is deeply vicious, like Davies' "Sunny Afternoon" or "Nothing to Say," because of the freedom afforded by its distance from his own lived-in reality: the hopeless, relentless anger becomes terrifyingly palpable because there is nothing like true pain and its consequences holding it back. That doesn't make it an intellectual exercise, it only reinforces that the great skill of any artist who practices in concocting sophisticated narratives, which is true of both Davies and Darnielle and not a great many other worthwhile rock songwriters, is his or her ability to funnel actual pain and the resulting experience and emotional intelligence into something superficially distant from their own inner worlds. (Or at least we hope so.)

Get Lonely is unique for Darnielle for a couple of reasons. The first is that almost none of the above applies to it; it is, in fact, an album that sounds very explicitly like a cry from the depths of considerable desperation of a sort difficult to explain or quantify -- in other words, something on the spectrum of clinical depression: causeless, directionless, pointless, cruel. Secondly, its status as an album of drunken solitude and soulless, empty dark-night silence is tied equally to its music and faint, shadowy arrangements as to its lyrics, which at times are as evocative as anything their composer has written. Until a sudden snap into action -- horns! breathing! --on "If You See Light," the record sounds exactly like the things it describes, which is a world away from the sweet delicacy and newly muscular energy of The Sunset Tree or Tallahassee. Its essence is in the space between notes, and the torment of all the awful thoughts that are capable of filling these spaces.

This isn't to argue that Get Lonely is a more accurate reflection of Darnielle's personality than his other records, which we can't really know (no, shut up, we can't), or that it's better or deeper; literary abstraction, after all, is the foundation of a lot of our most affecting art. It does seem significant, however, that a room full of people can sway to The Sunset Tree's "This Year" and have it mean hundreds of thousands of different things despite its clear ties to one man's awful former reality, but "Woke Up New" and "Wild Sage" and "Moon Over Goldsboro" can freeze those same people, lowering their heads and mumbling along, and whether their sentiments are any sharper or less generous or not, you cannot deny that they work far less devotedly to make their angst easily palatable, digestible as defiant anthem, as celebratory sentiment, or as potential redemption. (Can just saying things as they are offer a kind of redemption? It probably depends on your mood.) "This Year" is a great song and there's nothing the matter with harnessing despair as a contrast or avenue to future, imaginative joys, but "Woke Up New" offers no room for arm-waving, and in fact none of the cinematic comforts of a middle or an end. It provides neither a way out of the immaculately described first moments stepping out of the shell of a longtime relationship, nor any evidence that it knows where to look for one, aside from waiting for it; it is only a moment in time, and a brief one, and one so universal but so chillingly specific that it's hard not to weep at its vividness.

On "Woke Up New" as on most of the album, the arrangements are stark and while some sort of a band wavers around Darnielle's vocals and alternating piano and guitar, they never assert themselves enough to feel like anything more than a mysterious creak on a doorstep outside or wind blowing through some cracks in the siding. Darnielle wrote its songs late at night in various hotels while on tour (and around the same time he rented space in a particularly desolate office building near his home, which he once said inspired the album's mood), and they capture the fearsome, devastating feeling of being stuck with oneself, with one's own voice the only accompaniment. The intensity that does arrive, as in the percussive "New Monster Avenue," only reinforces how loud the silence can sometimes get, despite the use of a (very Darnielle) Mary Shelley-James Whale metaphor. But silence itself fills in all of the spaces elsewhere. He would describe the title track as being about "loneliness that incapacitates you," and while there is some faint suggestion of a more detailed back story (the face he sees when he looks at the window), it's almost a completely disembodied document of emotion, and as clear and precise as its words are, it would have none of this effect if not for the incredibly stark, almost forebodingly raw arrangement -- despite the reticent sympathies, eventually, of a string section.

"Moon Over Goldsboro" carries forward with this mood, and yet again it's in his attachment to detail that Darnielle somehow tells a story that's deeply, uncomfortably familiar; and it is also how he conquers any fear of slipping into cliché. The stasis of its uncommunicative limbo of a relationship punctuated by bleary-eyed solo late nights permeates the music and words alike, and it's complicated enough to capture the infuriatingly unknowable, illogical nucleus of depression. The tentative fear of taking any decisive action and the simultaneous fear of standing still inform the aimless midnight gas station trip, as well as the inability to air his numbness and despair to a seemingly oblivious loved one, who is there all of the time but somehow he wakes up alone.

Like all of Darnielle's heroes, these figures of self-imposed confinement know how to do one thing well: they can talk to themselves, and they can transform the most incomprehensible human conditions into rational clarity, if not poetry. "I wished I was someone else, I wished it was warmer" is found art. "Squint your eyes and hope real hard, maybe sprout wings" is folk wisdom; received wisdom, repeated even if not believed. "Some days I don't miss my family and some days I do" is artless but sublime. The very next line, "Some days I think I'd feel better if I tried harder; most days I know it's not true," seems less devastating at first, but on reflection its resignation means more, and provides an entire troubling context for the estranged family. That song, the opener "Wild Sage," nods slightly in its piano and relative sweetness (especially in the falsetto Darnielle employs throughout) to The Sunset Tree, and presents with grave empathy a horrible reversal of that album's premise, sending an isolated, mentally ill anti-hero out into a world he doesn't understand, that has no hope of understanding or forgiving him. For all its consciousness of ethereal beauty, its sound of doors slamming to any hopeful future is nearly palpable -- and it's one of the finest, most crushing songs in a storied career.

"Half Dead" makes mild gestures to the mood of Tallahassee in the same way "Wild Sage" does to Sunset Tree, with perhaps the album's only real guitar hook; but as usual when Darnielle shoots for pop, its immediacy isn't hard-won. It's not even won. The lyrics practically slam the music to the ground and argue with it; an entire verse about cleaning house alone ("try to think like a machine") is bound to conjure up terrible memories for almost anyone, and the only climax on offer is the title -- "can't get you out of my head, lost without you, half dead" -- which is proffered with none of the joyous bitterness of "No Children" or (name your favorite distorted cassette anthem), it's a surrender, a cop to absolute misery. But like real-life cops to absolute misery, there's an oddly inspiring melancholy to these songs -- perhaps the sole great solace of severe depression is that the only result of hitting bottom is finding out you can go even lower -- few of which aspire to the kind of aural balance between trad solo goats and full-band Goats of this one and "Song for Lonely Giants." No other album by the group sounds quite this dark, which has the effect of making the upbeat moments sound more tempered, less graceful, a frantic high rather than a moment of actual triumph.

At the end of everything, Get Lonely's handiest feature is that it actually is comforting -- the same way as Pet Sounds (a record Darnielle also probably hates), because its unique approach to universal emotions erases a lifetime of banality to try to uncover the gritty reality that sits at the very core of these feelings that are, alas, all but inescapable to our existence, and maybe especially our existence as the sorts of people who listen to Mountain Goats records. (If you've been to one of their shows, you're well aware that the lone common denominator is that nearly everyone there appears to have had enough bad days to passionately appreciate a good one.) How would it actually feel to listen to "Woke Up New" while living out one of the moments it describes rather than just remembering it? Maybe it would be cathartic, maybe it would be impossible, and hell, maybe it would seem trite (though I seriously doubt it). "What do I do without you?" has probably been said and sung by civilization more than any other line Darnielle will ever sing, but the pain of making too much coffee, the pain of being cold and putting on a sweater, the pain of wandering through the house: those are experiences and memories, and they along with his voice lend credence to the familiar thesis. Maybe by the time you hear the song, you'll know the answer to its central question, but the experience of remembering how it felt to ask it is as profound and chilling as anything music, or communication, or art, can deliver to us. Sometimes it takes a poet to state the obvious that well.