No musician has so artfully articulated the trials and tribulations of the lost souls at the fringes of America as John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats. He has released an absolutely brilliant concept album about a group of tweakers coming apart at the seams, another absolutely brilliant concept album about a marriage coming apart at the seams, and you get the idea. Darnielle, who has published two novels, has a writer’s eye for the telling detail, and no one, and I mean no one, has his ability to write songs that are like nuanced short stories—short stories that will break your heart.
Transcendental Youth is yet another concept album, albeit a loosely constructed one, with most of its cuts being about various down-and-outers living in Washington state. A homeless guy, a PCP abuser—why, there’s even a song about mixed martial arts practitioners the Diaz brothers, although I’m not sure why they’re included. Ditto the one about Frankie Lymon, the New York City singer who overdosed on heroin in his grandmother’s bathroom in 1968. But if the concept is loose, the songs are alternately defiant and lovely, fatalistic and haunting—in the slow and beautiful “White Cedar,” for example, a guy who frequently finds himself in lockdown sees “the light of his spirit descend” as he stands at a bus stop and there receives the word he will “be made a new creature.” That’s transcendence in the face of awful reality indeed, and it reminds me, as many of Darnielle’s songs do, of the late poet Allen Ginsberg’s lines, “It’s hard to eat shit/Without having visions.”
The fast and shuffling “Amy aka Spent Gladiator 1” is a paean to those souls who are attracted to self-destruction, and after singing, “Do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive/Do every stupid thing to try to drive the dark away/Let people call you crazy for the choices that you make/Five minutes past the limits/Jump in front of trains all day,” he adds, “And stay alive/Just stay alive.” “Lakeside View Apartment Suites” is a slow number about some guys holed up in a crummy hole “watching for the guy who who’s got the angel dust/Crystal clear connection.” The chorus is lovely, the detail is stunning, and it doesn’t really hit home until the narrator sings, “You can’t judge us/You’re not the judge,” then tosses off, “One whole life recorded/In disappearing ink,” which is far more damning a judgment than any real judge could make.
“Cry for Judas” is a sunny number with a great horn section in which the perky melody is in direct contrast to the words. It’s theme is the same as “Amy aka Spent Gladiator 1,” with Darnielle opening the song with the lines, “Some things you do just to see how bad they’ll make you feel,” then going on to sing, “Speed up to the precipice/And then slam on the brakes.” As for the chorus, it’s bleak: “Long black nights/Morning frost/I’m still here/But all is lost.” Meanwhile, the propulsive “Harlem Roulette” opens with the great lines, “Unknown engines underneath the city/Steam pushing up in billows through the grates/Frankie Lymon’s tracking ‘Sea Breeze’ in a studio in Harlem/It’s 1968.” The chorus (“The loneliest people in the whole wide world/Are the ones you’re never going to see again”) is just as enigmatic as the lines, “Every dream’s a good dream/Even awful dreams are good dreams/If you’re doing it right.”
“White Cedar” is the song I referred to at the beginning of this review, and it’s every bit as spiritual as the great “Against Pollution” off Darnielle’s best album, 2004’s We Shall All Be Healed. Transcendental Youth is the first Mountain Goats LP to boast a horn section, and there are few finer moments than the one where the horns join Darnielle on piano. “Like a star come down to walk the earth in radiant display,” sings Darnielle, “I saw the light of my spirit descend the other day.” The narrator may be touched, mentally, but says, “And you can’t tell me what my spirit tells me isn’t true/Can you?” And though he wakes up in lockdown again, he sings, “I’ll be reborn someday, someday/If I wait long enough/I don’t have to be afraid/I don’t want to be afraid.” The haunting and lugubrious “Until I Am Whole” is similarly spiritual, with the narrator questioning, questioning. He’s in a state park in Washington, sitting on a picnic bench alone, and he sings, “And I think I’ll stay here/Until I feel whole again/I don’t know when.”
“Night Light” opens with the lines “nerves strung so tight/I am a mandolin” and includes, I believe, a character from an earlier LP, All Hail West Texas. The song’s instrumentation is new for Darnielle, but I’ll be damned if I know what’s making that cool sound, because I don’t see any synthesizers listed in the album credits. “The Diaz Brothers” is a punchy tune, big on the drums, and features the chorus, “Mercy for the Diaz brothers/Mercy for the Diaz brothers.” Is he singing about the mixed martial arts practitioners? I have no idea. What I do know is the song is catchy as Hell, indeed almost as catchy as the perky “Counterfeit Florida Plates,” a tune about a homeless guy whose life can be distilled down to “Dig through trash/Sleep on the grates/And watch for the cars with the counterfeit Florida plates.”
“In Memory of Satan” is moody and the horn arrangement is great, and concerns a guy “locked up in myself/Never gonna get free.” Unlike most of Darnielle’s songs I can’t make out what he’s singing about, which is a disappointment, albeit one not shared by “Spent Gladiator 2,” which recasts the theme of “Amy AKA Spent Gladiator 1,” only more literally. “Like a spent gladiator/Crawling in the coliseum dust,” sings Darnielle, before pleading, “Stay in the game/Just try to play through the pain/Like a fighter who’s been told it’s finally time for him to quit/Show up in shining colors and then stand there and get hit.” And just as in the album’s opening tune he sings, “Stay alive/Maybe spit some blood at the camera/Just stay alive/Stay forever alive.” The title cut and LP closer opens with a great horn blare, and is a cryptic meditation in which Darnielle sings, “Learn some secrets/Never tell/Stay sick/Don’t get well.” To the accompaniment of some great brush work Darnielle croons, “Sing, sing high/While the fire climbs/Sing one for the old times,” and once again I’m sorry to report I don’t know what he’s singing about, a problem not to be encountered on such LPs as We Shall All Be Healed, All Hail West Texas, and Tallahassee.
Darnielle is the best lyricist in the United States; indeed, the only person I can think of who comes close is Randy Newman who, while he is certainly capable of pathos, is primarily a satirist, while Darnielle is first and foremost an empathetic soul attracted to souls dwelling on the dark side, whether they be crystal meth addicts or a guy working in a liquor store who shoots a would-be robber in the face with a shotgun. On the lovely and moving “Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod” he sings of himself as a child, “young and good,” who sits in his bedroom, consoled only by the music on his stereo. “I’m in my room with the headphones on/Deep in the dream chamber,” he sings, when his belligerent stepfather bursts in and beats him. After which he consoles himself by singing, “One of these days/I’m going to wriggle up on dry land.” I have no idea whether the song is autobiographical, but it perfectly expresses our shared love of music and its magical powers that allow us to escape the ugly aspects of our messy, painful lives. And for that Darnielle deserves our praise. He speaks what we know to be true but are unable to express, and that makes Darnielle a true artist, perhaps the best one we’re blessed to have amongst us.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
