The Post-Rockist

The Mountain Goats
Get Lonely
[4AD; 2006]

Music critics who are a bit more deadline-driven than your fellow Post-Rockists have gotten their opinions to the public earlier and have classified The Mountain Goats’ new album Get Lonely as a break-up album. They are wrong. It isn’t a break-up album; it’s a broke-up album. John Darnielle isn’t screaming at the top of his lungs sado-masochistic death wishes to his lover, as he does in “No Children.” There aren’t the many scenes of the bitter hatred and anger of two people whose relationship is exploding violently. There aren’t even two people, period, in the new album. There is the one lone solitary character, left alone to his own grief, his own guilt, his own self-loathing, and (scariest), his own imagination, which turns out to be his torturer.

To understand the album, all you need do is to look very closely into the box below.

“What in tarnation are you talking about, Post-Rockist?” you may be saying to yourself as you click down to see simply a black box with nothing in it. It’s just a black box, right? It isn’t one of those odd paintings from the nineties where you can see a sailboat if you just look hard enough, right?

Nope, it’s just a black box. Just darkness. Just void. But look at it more intently. Get closer to it. Take each of your hands and adjust upward and downward, backward and forward, your computer monitor. Go ahead, move the monitor around and look into the middle of the void intently.

Do you see yourself in the darkness? “Oh, so it’s a mirror, right?” you think. So what is this box you see upon you monitor screen? Well, which is it? Is it just a black-filled void or is it a mirror?

Get Lonely’s answer to the question is “yes.”

“Oh, you silly Post-Rockist. Why are you trying to be smarter than you really are?” you’re now thinking. Okay, so this demonstration is a bit gimmicky, but let us take it a step further. Imagine that this black void/mirror were the only thing you were able to look at for minutes, or for days, or for months. Pretend you’re in the Twilight Zone or a Kafka story and that somehow you are trapped and cannot do anything but look deeply into the black void/mirror at yourself, alone. What would you do? What would you think? You would probably get a bit bored at first, but the black void/mirror is still, is incessantly, the only thing you can see. Some power prevents you from moving your head to the left or to the right, from looking away. You are trapped and the only movement you can make is the movement of your mind from one idea, thought, image, or scene to another. What would you think? How would you think? There are no visitors in this experiment. There are no breaks. Imagine yourself for months staring into the black void/mirror and nothing else.

From Track One, “Wild Sage”: “And I loose my footing and I skin my hands breaking my fall / And I laugh to myself and look up at the skies / and I think I hear angels in my ears / Like marbles being thrown against a mirror”

From Track Two, “New Monster Avenue”: “I look down at my hands like they were mirrors”

From Track Seven, “In the Hidden Places”: “I pulled my sleeves over my hands.”

Skinned-hand mirrors. What does that reflection look like? It looks like the kind of reflection you can’t bear. To destroy the reflection, you must destroy the mirror. The marble is an interesting choice of object. Yes, enough marbles can break it, but will they really do the job, and wouldn’t a greater implement of destruction do better. But you can’t really break that mirror, can you?

What other images does the narrator see in that mirror? A monster. From “If You See the Light”: “When the villagers come to my door / I will hide underneath the table in the dining room / Knees drawn up to my chest. / When the villagers come to my door / I will breathe shallow breaths from high up in my stomach/ and go ‘huh huh huh huh huh huh huh.’ / Waiting for the front door to splinter. / Waiting all winter.”

From “New Monster Avenue”: “All the neighbors come from their front porches waiving torches.”

So Darnielle even gives us the kind of monster, and contrary to the title “New Monster Avenue,” this monster he is very old: Frankenstein. For those of you who have ever read the book or have seen or read The Elephant Man, you’ll know that all the deformed creature wants is love. That is the brutal reality of the story of the deformed: it is the only story where our true need for love can be expressed unashamedly and unsentimentally. But Get Lonely’s deformed character is the product of his love lost. The mind moves toward self-loathing thus.

The chronology of the songs on this album seem incorrect. Track Three, “Half Dead,” details the narrator’s attempt to clean house and “throw old things away” in his house now that he the sole occupier of that house. But Track Eight, “Woke Up New,” begins by telling the listener about “the morning when I woke up without you for the first time.” Shouldn’t “Woke Up New” be before “Half Dead” in the track listing if chronology mattered?

It doesn’t. Loneliness is a feeling, a result, the end of a series of chronological events that leave no possibility for further chronology because every day, hour, minute, and second carry the same feeling. That’s why people tell you that you have to “move on” after a break-up—because time is standing still for you. That type of loneliness is arrest.

Back to the black void/mirror. If you were forced by some power to experience and live in front of that black void/mirror only, you would begin to live utterly solipsisticly, living utterly in your own mind and in your own reflection(s). That reflection would coerce your mind’s eye to try to escape. The narrator in Get Lonely is constantly trying to escape, to break loose. His daydreams and night dreams sometime border upon hallucination, sometimes cross that border. Nightmares destroy him and daydreams bring moments of futile bliss that are violently rubbed out by reality. This is an album characterizing the thoughts of one constantly staring into the black void/mirror. He speaks to himself because there is no one else to talk to, since the loss of his beloved necessarily means his exile from all others.

Perhaps the most terrifying song on the album is “Moon Over Goldsboro.” The narrator dreams that his lost beloved is actually there, in the house, waiting for him to come home. The dreams seem so real that the listener almost forgets that he is really alone. He walks home in the darkness of night: “And as I was crossing our doorstep / I hesitated just a moment there. / Remembered the day we moved into our small house / Till the vision got to vivid to bear.” He then enters the house, which is his mind, lost in phantasy, completely forgetting or suppressing the reality that caused him to hesitate.

You were almost asleep
Halfway undressed
I lay right down next to you
held your head against my chest

And a guy with any kind of courage
would maybe stop to think the matter through
Maybe hold you still and raise the question
Instead of blindly holding onto you

But we crank up the heat
And you giggle and moan
Spend all night in the company of ghosts
Always wake up alone

And what is that question? What could he ask her that he hasn’t before? How could he express to this hallucination what he’s never expressed? Or is the question to be put to himself? Is the question which requires such courage the question of whether he’s going crazy? Put someone in a black box for days or months, and that person will be deeply disturbed. Put someone in a black box with nothing but a mirror, and that person will go mad.

Finally, anyone who has heard more than one other Mountain Goats album must notice that John Darnielle does not shriek, yell, or even trill in anger at all on this album. Not once. In “If You See the Light,” his voice almost reaches above the weak, pathetic falsetto that is present in all of these songs, but it doesn’t. He hasn’t lost his voice. He has found the voice that he needed to use for this album. There is no room for anger or yelling in a broke-up album. From “Song for Lonely Giants”:

Face in the leaves
Song in my throat
Fall through the air
Hoping to float

Practicing my solitary scales ’til they grow heavy
too heavy to carry
Watching them go where they will go

Now, scroll back up to the black void/mirror. Buy the album here or here. Put the album on and listen to the entire thing while looking into the black void/mirror. Feel the album that way, as if the album doesn’t make you feel that loneliness on its own.