Babylon Springs EP
By Sean Moeller

Through all thicks and thins and against the innumerable odds, John Darnielle never hands over a record that could be met with a scoff or an adverse reaction if you’re at all familiar with any Mountain Goats material. There’s a lot to choose from – about seven times more that Nirvana – and all of it bares the same kind of snowflake resemblance. From far away, each one looks and sounds like any other clump of white, frozen precipitation, but up close, when you really get up into their grills, “Sweden,” “Full Force Galesburg,” “The Sunset Tree” and everything between and after is distinct in its make-ups, telling of different bumpy roads and different heads butting. No one song and no one record is the same.

The five songs on the Australia tour-only EP “Babylon Springs” carry on with the fine Mountain Goats tradition of recognition with no real connective tis sues other than the sprawling narratives and the distinctively pat strumming that must lead to broken strings left and right. Darnielle, one of the slyest and deftest writers in indie rock and roll, is exemplary in his ability to make a sad situation hummable. He’s a perfectionist when it comes to throwing characters and situations at the wall and then recording their every free-falling move on their ways down to the floor. The miseries are the cherries on top and it’s great to listen to his stories, because every once in a long while, the sun breaks from the clouds and sprays those glimmers of hope that are what usually provoke the storybook endings that we hear about over the dins and doom. What’s usually found at the ends of these albums are torn out pages and maybe some scribbling or other vandalism. The happily ever afters are going to have to wait.

Each time Darnielle begins to play, there’s an instant acknowledgement that characters will be shameful, they’ll seek forgiveness, they’ll do all the wrong things and then want to take at least half of them back, but leave the other half. The people of his songs are people the way they’ll always be, so utterly flawed that they’re all-American. And like the music that Darnielle puts to these stories, the people involved with them have been told of for centuries. They’re the tragic figures that make good television, better movies and great fucking songs. You’ve heard all of the possible chord progressions anyone’s ever going to come up with zillions of times, but you’ve never heard the song “Alibi” in the same way ever before. You’ve never heard the possibility in the air shared by two pussy-footing lovers – coupled with an up-stroking, 1950s pop guitar – that makes the affair sound like such a deserving outcome. At least for a moment, as this is likely just part one of a trilogy that will go from the bliss and sweet anxiety to the confrontation and the messy, messy aftermath when all parties find out what’s been going on. He leaves himself a path to write as he seems to always do. He reaches into his alt-country bag of tricks for a cover of the Trembling Blue Stars song “Sometimes I Still Feel The Bruise,” assuming the brushstrokes of The Eagles and turning out a magnificent rendition singing, “Making contact gets harder as the silence grows longer/What would you think of me/You were not the one in love when you were not the dreamer/When you were just the dream/I’m under no illusion/As to what I meant to you/But you made an impression/Sometimes I still feel the bruise.”

“Wait For You” is a powerful slow ballad that reminds of the forever underappreciated Jude. Darnielle sounds vulnerable and close to breaking down into a shuddering mess. His voice and his light guitar is barely there, whispering to one another, tethered to a dark cloud.

www.themountaingoats.net
www.4ad.com