So you want to get into...The Mountain Goats Part 4

Get Lonely

Best Song: If You See Light

Track List:

1.) Wild Sage
2.) New Monster Avenue 
3.) Half Dead
4.) Get Lonely
5.) Maybe Sprout Wings
6.) Moon Over Goldsboro
7.) In the Hidden Places
8.) Song for Lonely Giants
9.) Woke Up New
10.) If You See Light
11.) Cobra Tattoo
12.) In Corolla

This is the only album by The Mountain Goats that I still can’t stand. After being blown away by The Sunset Tree, an album I disliked on my first listen, I decided to give Get Lonely a second go. I mean sure when I first heard The Mountain Goats I hated them and then after I found out I liked some of their stuff I made a huge misstep by getting Get Lonely as my first album… and I deleted it almost immediately. But maybe on this second go around I would at least like it, right?

Wrong.

Now it isn’t that the songs aren’t well written. They are all mostly decent with some even being beautiful. "New Monster Avenue" is a perfect example of this. It is blue at the track list so that shows that I hate it, but I would love it if it was an instrumental. That’s right I am saying that John Darnielle, one of the masters of “lyrics come save my song” fu, should have completely dropped the vocals on most of these tracks. Or at the very least given them to someone who could perform with the vulnerability and frailty he wants to convey.

That really is Darnielle’s biggest flaw in his vocal delivery. He has a very strong voice and when he tries to make it seem fragile it just feels so forced that I can’t get behind it. If you want the effect of a thin pleading vocal, please just get Kaki King to guest (and she should get Darnielle to guest when she needs more powerful vocals for a song, but that is a different issue). I will always prefer his glazed eyed sorrow of a delivery on “Pale Green Things” from The Sunset Tree to the strained emotion of “Wild Sage” or the title track.

But it isn’t all bad. “Moon Over Goldsboro” and “In the Hidden Places” are fantastically arranged pieces, even if “In The Hidden Places” occasionally falls to the thin vocal performance. But when it comes down to it if there is one reason to own this album “If You See Light” is it. It is Sunset Tree good. Everything from Big Band sway and the confident vocals to the drums and organ are just perfectly in place.

Of all the albums I have heard from The Mountain Goats, Get Lonely is the only one that I still consider bad. Sure some other ones are spotty, but this...this is just not what I want to listen to. Next time we take a leap back in time, to the very beginning.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3