Tuesday, September 12, 2006
The Mountain Goats
Get Lonely
(4AD)
The Mountain Goats, comprised of singer-songwriter John Darnielle, follow last year’s inspirational The Sunset Tree, with Get Lonely, a bittersweet longing gaze into that sunset. This album should go down in history with the great breakup albums, except that Darnielle is divorcing himself from the world that he so ardently grasped last year. His usual strident acoustic power strum is traded for a lighter, almost tropical take, with his lamentations whispered over the breeze. The opening track “Wild Sage,” punctuates the saddest girl from Ipanema with dots of piano while “Half Dead” takes on a classic singer-songwriter hue. The real star on any Mountain Goats album are the lyrics though, and while this sweet album is no where as loquacious and urgent as his earlier work, the relative economy of his wordplay focuses the emotions like a laser beam. The first single “Woke Up New,” with it’s tender, clever video, offers an almost cubist analysis of a breakup, seeing the failures and missteps and aftermath from every angle. Darnielle has long been held as indie rock’s most literary scribe, and this may be the gentlest introduction to his body of work. >>More
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