Ghosts and weeds ... hands and mirrors ... blood and clouds — some of the recurring images on John Darnielle's latest album, Get Lonely. Darnielle and friends are The Mountain Goats . His songs are electric poems set to haunting, minimalistic music. Typical lyrics from "Woke Up New", as the narrator asks himself, "What do I do without you?":
The first time I made coffee for just myself I made too much of it
But I drank it all just cause you hate it when I let things go to waste
And I wandered through the house like a little boy lost at the mall
And an astronaut could have seen the hunger in my eyes from space
Rian Johnson has created an enchanting video for "Woke Up New"; it's on Youtube and in a higher-res version at https://vimeo.com/1552092.
When coffee-house music doesn't work it's like the beat-poetry brilliantly parodied in Daniel Pinkwater's Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror. Darnielle's verse, however, almost always works ...
(cf. Mountain Goats fan site , RatTales (10 May 2003), ...)
TopicPoetry - TopicArt - TopicEntertainment - 2006-09-24
(correlates: RatTales, Comments on LyricalHook, NorvigLaws, ...)