john darnielle

A Week With The Mountain Goats' "Get Lonely": Day 2

28 August 2006
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Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Shannon Palmer
In several places on “Get Lonely,” Darnielle sounds as if he’s crippled by something phantasmic. Right here in this river city last week, a discovery was made of five crop circles in a soybean field. Of course, there was no explanation for the finding other than deeming it one of life’s great mysteries. These markings came from thin air and they’ll never really be claimed. They showed up. Darnielle’s “crop circles” come in the form of ghostly beings and phantom riders, blasts from the past who aren’t at all welcome, it seems. They appear in so many in this collection of songs that they must find him so often that they become less frightening. Say for instance, that you’ve grown accustomed to eating breakfast and downing liquor shots with the rotting, severed head of an Indian chief in a box off to the side of your table (something that Al Swearengen does in the second season of “Deadwood”), in that act you’ve found normalcy. No longer is it an abstraction, but an expectant thing. This ghost, or whatever it is that’s haunting the protagonist—only presumably Darnielle, though he’s really thrown us out of the boat on these last two records, publicly tossing us that bone that some of the material is autobiographical; we were better off believing everything was a fictitious narrative of that alpha male and alpha female who just bicker and fight, but stay together—never loses its ability to unnerve. Who is this ghost? Everything about these songs kind of spooks and it all leads back to what that “thing” did to the hero of our story. It’s almost suggested that our hero himself is a monster because of the other. In “New Monster Avenue,” Darnielle sings, “Fresh coffee at sunrise/Warm my lips against the cup,” but the illustration is meant for a Frankenstein-ish creature, with stitchmarks holding all of his spare parted skin together and the hunted for organs inside. Within the comfort of its own home it sees no problems, but outside the neighbors greet him with torches. The monster is more than one.

The Mountain Goats

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