Talk is cheap. Talk is incessant, unremitting. Talk can often be like a splintered javelin rammed repeatedly down your ear canal. Silence is golden. But then there are rare voices – few and far between – that you could listen to for hours and hours, endlessly, without wearing. Like honey melting over a roasted hazelnut. John Darnielle, the face of and largely lone member of the plural Mountain Goats, is one of those voices. He has to be. He certainly wouldn’t have reached 10 albums old without that quality, which is where he finds himself today with his fourth 4AD album ‘Get Lonely’ (essentially a major label deal for someone who used to recorded whole albums, just he and his guitar, onto your common-or-garden boom box). He is the John Peel’s Home Truths of rudimentary singer-songwriters in that respect, which would surely make a recording of his actual Peel Session a colossal collectable synthesis of delectable pop oratory.
His lasting, durable appeal might not be immediately evident. On the surface his vocal is nasal, blunt and wavering, far from warming. But superficial qualities can be a signpost to all else beneath on performances of any real depth, and it’s his genuinely sincere voice that leads you to the heart of rich, absorbing narratives. His poems are honest, charged and simple in many respects – you can only really presume them to be sketches of true events – yet they’re also so elegantly framed, packed with skewiff metaphors and beautiful turns of phrase that feel somehow unique to him.
It’s never been much about the music – other than giving it a heartbeat, assigning an ambience – it’s all about what’s falling from his lips. “The first time I made coffee for just myself, I made too much of it, but I drank it all, because you hated when I let things go to waste”. See? “And an astronaut could have seen the hunger in my eyes from space. What do I do?” (‘Woke Up New’). It’s in the minutiae. Break up songs are just never so proficiently cross-sectioned. And there’s much more where they came from. But the music on ‘Get Lonely’ is more rounded than before and worth noting, more grave, more somber. Certainly nothing on here feels flippant. Songs like the familiarly tip-toeing ‘Cobra Tattoo’ and ‘In the Hidden Places’ are dressed in subtle, close strings, and the percussion and mariachi horns of ‘If You See Light’ feel authoritatively grand. And while the subject matter may not be so serious as on his brilliant last record ‘The Sunset Tree’, as a record it has a feeling of importance.
We have not heard all of his records, but we have heard enough to know he has built his reputation upon a seemingly never-ending source of inspiration within this template. And nothing much changes here, because of course nothing has to. We’re still listening.