Get Lonely

The Mountain Goats

4AD, 2006

http://www.themountaingoats.net/

REVIEW BY: Melanie Love

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 07/16/2008

This album is almost too good that I don’t want to listen to it and wear it out. Because it’s not just good -- it’s complicated and lovely and a little bit raw, one of those perfectly crafted discs that almost reaffirms my faith in humanity, or at least in music. High praise, I’m aware, but there’s an immediacy to this batch of spare, lo-fi, lovelorn (and, above all, hauntingly bleak) songs, largely due to how visceral singer-songwriter John Darnielle’s lyrics are.

Darnielle, the brainchild behind The Mountain Goats, is something of a godsend for literary geeks like me -- he’s prolific, having written over four hundred songs in the last decade, but more impressively, he can coax any subject matter into a clear, tangible tune that will echo with you long after it finishes. Not to mention, he was named America’s best non-hip-hop lyricist by the New Yorker a few years back.

Get Lonely, the tenth full-length recording from the California native, comes on the heels of 2005’s The Sunset Tree, a wrenching but ultimately anthemic album dedicated to Darnielle’s abusive stepfather. But the note of peace that Sunset Tree concluded on has been dampened this time around, leaving the narrator steeped in loss and dread and nagging dreams following a crushing breakup, each track colored over with an empty, brutal darkness that seems to harden your very soul as you listen.my_heart_sings_the_harmony_web_ad_alt_250

The imagery Darnielle renders in clear, precise lyrics is harshly evocative: on opener “Wild Sage,” “along the highway, where unlucky stray dogs bleed, wild sage grows in the weeds,” while “Half Dead” has the narrator wondering “What are the years we gave each other ever gonna be worth?” Meanwhile, the instrumentation paired with these bleak tracks, all sung in either Darnielle’s frail, whispery register or a lower, weighed-down croon, is anything but.

Instead, everything is warm and cleanly produced, all light, languid touches of acoustic guitar intersecting with rippling drums and organs and cello accents. “If You See The Light” jangles along to an almost Afropop sort of beat, and the aforementioned “Half Dead” is alive with curving guitar lines overlaid with acoustic strums. For me, it’s the punchiness and the almost poppy sensibility of the backdrops here that really make the stripped-bare lyrics hit home.

Get Lonely relies mainly on mood to link these primarily disconnected, hazy slivers of songs together, rather than the narrative-driven action of Sunset Tree. Still, though the entire forty minutes through Darnielle’s eyes is stunning, there are a couple of standouts. “Maybe Sprout Wings” is full of amorphous dreams and ominous guitar chords that set a bleaker, more cramped tone, and the refrain “Ghosts and clouds and nameless things / Squint your eyes and hope real hard / Maybe sprout wings,” is achingly lovely and eerily tangible.

“Woke Up New” is most steeped in realism, setting up the narrator “on the morning when I woke up without you for the first time” as he brews too much coffee for one and aimlessly wanders through the streets, wondering only “What do I do? What do I do without you?” It’s a hollow ode, to be sure, but backed by rising guitar chords and flecks of bass, “Woke Up New” is resonant and haunting.

Closer “In Corolla” provides as much resolution as is possible for this stark, chilling collection of songs as the narrator one day finally “turned my back on all you people” and wades out into the “warm, warm water.” With only a lone acoustic guitar strumming behind him, there is no fanfare, only a quiet sense of resolution, of being pulled under, of giving in.

Get Lonely is brutal and difficult, but it’s somehow beautiful, too for its intimacy, its bare-bones, familiar feel, and Darnielle is truly a poet through whom the world is better seen.

Rating: A

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