We'll return to our MMS recap next week.  Right now, we have something to talk about.  Today the Mountain Goats release their wonderful Get Lonely into the wild, and it bears no small measure of scrutiny.

Get Lonely is the Mountain Goats' fourth album since signing to 4AD, and the first since the early nineties where John Darnielle sounds truly comfortable recording in a studio.  It is also an overwhelmingly quiet album, Darnielle's voice staying close and low as he tells you what he knows about loneliness, feeling for the edges and plumbing the rich interior.  This is a sad, sad piece of work.

The album opens with "Wild Sage," perhaps its bleakest point.  Lone piano notes accompany Darnielle's syncopated guitar as he describes leaving the house at daybreak and walking along the highway, unable to get a ride.  Darnielle manages to rescue the idea from maudlin self-pity:

    And some days I don't miss my family
    and some days I do
    some days I think I'd feel better if I tried harder
    most days I know it's not true

There is a luxuriousness to the suffering, and when the speaker trips on the shoulder of the highway, he says: "...I think I hear angels in my ears/like marbles being thrown against a mirror."  We are left with this image:

    and along the highway
    from castoff innumerable seeds
    wild sage growing
    in the weeds

I've already spoken about "Woke Up New," but it remains the album’s high point, revisiting the same scene as earlier Mountain Goats songs like “Alpha Omega” and “Korean Bird Paintings (The narrator wakes up to find his love has left him), only now Darnielle is much more acute in his description of the emotional landscape.  “And I wandered through the house/ like a little boy lost at the mall” is a perfectly simple and surgically accurate metaphor, a hallmark of Mountain Goats’ songs.

The last four or five Mountain Goats albums have been almost monographic in tone.  While the songs themselves felt varied and  surprisingly arranged, they attempted to document or describe a specific kind of feeling.  In Tallahassee, there was a fairly clear narrative, and in the following albums, thematic or autobiographical touchstones tied everything together.  The program of Get Lonely is as obvious as it is ambitious: to map the continent of loneliness as clearly and completely as possible in twelve songs.  And it is a daunting thing to hear.