{"id":41010,"date":"2008-07-16T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-07-16T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/get-lonely\/"},"modified":"2008-07-16T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2008-07-16T00:00:00","slug":"get-lonely","status":"publish","type":"review","link":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/get-lonely\/","title":{"rendered":"Get Lonely"},"content":{"rendered":"

This album is almost too good that I don\u2019t want to listen to it and wear it out. Because it\u2019s not just good — it\u2019s 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\u2019m aware, but there\u2019s 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\u2019s lyrics are. <\/o:p><\/p>\n

Darnielle, the brainchild behind The Mountain Goats, is something of a godsend for literary geeks like me — he\u2019s 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<\/st1:place><\/st1:country-region>\u2019s best non-hip-hop lyricist by the New Yorker<\/i> a few years back. <\/o:p><\/i><\/p>\n

Get Lonely, <\/i>the tenth full-length recording from the California<\/st1:place><\/st1:state> native, comes on the heels of 2005\u2019s The Sunset Tree, <\/i>a wrenching but ultimately anthemic album dedicated to Darnielle\u2019s abusive stepfather. But the note of peace that Sunset Tree <\/i>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.<\/o:p><\/p>\n

The imagery Darnielle renders in clear, precise lyrics is harshly evocative: on opener \u201cWild Sage,\u201d \u201calong the highway, where unlucky stray dogs bleed, wild sage grows in the weeds,\u201d while \u201cHalf Dead\u201d has the narrator wondering \u201cWhat are the years we gave each other ever gonna be worth?\u201d Meanwhile, the instrumentation paired with these bleak tracks, all sung in either Darnielle\u2019s frail, whispery register or a lower, weighed-down croon, is anything but. <\/o:p><\/p>\n

Instead, everything is warm and cleanly produced, all light, languid touches of acoustic guitar intersecting with rippling drums and organs and cello accents. \u201cIf You See The Light\u201d jangles along to an almost Afropop sort of beat, and the aforementioned \u201cHalf Dead\u201d is alive with curving guitar lines overlaid with acoustic strums. For me, it\u2019s the punchiness and the almost poppy sensibility of the backdrops here that really make the stripped-bare lyrics hit home.<\/o:p><\/p>\n

Get Lonely <\/i>relies mainly on mood to link these primarily disconnected, hazy slivers of songs together, rather than the narrative-driven action of Sunset Tree. <\/i>Still, though the entire forty minutes through Darnielle\u2019s eyes is stunning, there are a couple of standouts. \u201cMaybe Sprout Wings\u201d is full of amorphous dreams and ominous guitar chords that set a bleaker, more cramped tone, and the refrain \u201cGhosts and clouds and nameless things \/ Squint your eyes and hope real hard \/ Maybe sprout wings,\u201d is achingly lovely and eerily tangible. <\/o:p><\/p>\n

\u201cWoke Up New\u201d is most steeped in realism, setting up the narrator \u201con the morning when I woke up without you for the first time\u201d as he brews too much coffee for one and aimlessly wanders through the streets, wondering only \u201cWhat do I do? What do I do without you?\u201d It\u2019s a hollow ode, to be sure, but backed by rising guitar chords and flecks of bass, \u201cWoke Up New\u201d is resonant and haunting.<\/o:p><\/p>\n

Closer \u201cIn Corolla\u201d provides as much resolution as is possible for this stark, chilling collection of songs as the narrator one day finally \u201cturned my back on all you people\u201d and wades out into the \u201cwarm, warm water.\u201d With only a lone acoustic guitar strumming behind him, there is no fanfare, only a quiet sense of resolution, of being pulled under, of giving in. <\/o:p><\/p>\n

Get Lonely <\/i>is brutal and difficult, but it\u2019s somehow beautiful, too for its intimacy, its bare-bones, familiar feel, and Darnielle is truly a poet through whom the world is better seen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":48,"featured_media":29433,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[8237],"rating":[5646],"class_list":["post-41010","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-the-mountain-goats","rating-rating-a"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/48"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41010"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41010\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=41010"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=41010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}