Few working artists have collected a richer physique of lore than the Mountain Goats. Throughout an unlimited catalog spanning greater than 30 years, John Darnielle has developed a mythology with sufficient recurring characters and references to fill its personal Wiki and assist a lot of devoted blogs and podcasts. The Sophoclean title of recent album Jenny From Thebes declares it as a continuation of the parable cycle. A sequel to Darnielle’s 2002 lo-fi masterpiece All Hail West Texas, his newest album revisits a number of the most beloved characters and settings within the Mountain Goats universe.
That earlier album was a unfastened assortment of story fragments about down-and-out folks; making out the entire image required some shut studying. Jenny From Thebes doesn’t proceed the story a lot as fill out its absent middle: Jenny, a recovering addict who runs a safehouse in a small West Texas city. When Jenny has appeared in different Mountain Goats songs, she has functioned as a obscure emblem of freedom: using in on her customized Kawasaki bike, promising escape. These songs deliver Jenny again all the way down to the sordid on a regular basis whereas additionally imbuing that determined actuality with the mushy glow of magic.
Regardless of the thematic callback to Darnielle’s home-recorded early work, the Mountain Goats have by no means sounded so baroque. Working with producer Trina Shoemaker, the now-standard lineup of Darnielle, bassist Peter Hughes, drummer Jon Wurster, and multi-instrumentalist Matt Douglas will get a carry with expansive string and horn preparations, and Bully’s Alicia Bognanno contributes icy stabs of echoing guitar. If this can be a rock opera, it’s a soft-rock opera. The plush preparations insulate the usually brutal scenes depicted within the lyrics. The jittery strums and surging backbeat on “Homicide on the 18th St. Storage” make its titular crime—Jenny killing her scumbag landlord—really feel like a victory. Within the standout “Water Tower,” a forensic account of Jenny disposing of the physique turns right into a lullaby: “Float downstream,” Darnielle murmurs over a mushy mattress of guitars. It’s the sound of tragedy recollected from afar, not reported reside from the scene.
In a method, Jenny From Thebes is exactly in regards to the wrestle to seek out the best distance: from the previous, from different folks, from ourselves. Darnielle is a grasp of the attitude shot; he’s typically at his most vivid when writing within the second individual. The narrator of “Cleansing Crew,” a loping response track to West Texas’ “Supply Decay,” imagines the ache of the addressee in medically exact element, nearly as if it had been her personal. The tenderness of those observations, along with the heat of the vocal supply, ensures that it takes a number of verses to appreciate that the track is definitely a farewell.
Early within the strings-driven “Similar as Money,” the place the speaker tries to reconstruct Jenny’s inside life, this realization emerges: “I can solely see the scene secondhand/I can solely attempt to perceive.” This assertion underlines Jenny’s tragic flaw: a compulsion to tackle others’ burdens till she breaks. It additionally occurs to be a reasonably good encapsulation of what the Mountain Goats do effectively. Darnielle has spent his profession making an attempt to get contained in the heads of injured athletes, useless celebrities, pagan warriors, and struggling junkies, discovering the humanity of their explicit struggling. The acknowledgement that we will by no means have complete entry is way from damning—it’s what provides his songs their license to function. Maybe that’s why these strains about our flailing makes an attempt to attach seem close to the start of “Similar as Money” and never the tip. Moderately than reducing the story brief, they clear the bottom for it to proceed.
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