Get Lonely Salina KS

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.

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.