The Mountain Goats - Get Lonely
21 August 06
The Mountain Goats release a brand new album - called Get Lonely - this week.
It's the successor to last year's The Sunset Tree, which was widely hailed as a masterpiece and went on to become the most successful record of John Darnielle's career.
But the new record occupies very different emotional territory - if The Sunset Tree (which chronicled the fraught, violent relationship between Darnielle and his stepfather) derived its power and energy from an unblinking exorcism of personal demons, Get Lonely is perhaps the quiet, haunted aftermath. It’s a reflective, intimate record; the mood is one of bittersweet resignation rather than cathartic release.
The songs are fleshed out with deft sensitivity by long-standing Darnielle collaborators Peter Hughes and Franklin Bruno, and there are luminous contributions from cellist Erik Friedlander and drummer Corey Fogel.
Even at its most languid, the album is never merely pretty, and even at its most troubled, it is never merely dark. It is, however, a delicately nuanced triumph – an uncannily coherent and subtly redemptive record which should come to be seen as The Mountain Goats’ most resonant, assured and magical collection of songs so far.
"Woke Up New" has a genuinely fantastic video which was directed by the award-winning film-maker Rian Johnson, whose first full feature Brick was released earlier in 2006.
You can watch the video on 4ad.com, and it's also up on YouTube.
John is celebrating the arrival of the new album with a week of radio and in-store appearances on the West Coast :
21st August, 1pm : KEXP in Seattle.
21st August , 11pm : Easy Street in Seattle.
22nd August, 6pm : Amoeba in San Francisco.
23rd August, 7pm : Amoeba in Los Angeles.
26th August : 826LA Benefit Show, Royce Hall, UCLA, Los Angeles.
27th August : Indie 103.1, Los Angeles.
