These days, most neo-folkies have novel preoccupations. They’re fascinated by children (Devendra Banhart) or American history (Sufjan Stevens) or fairy tales (Joanna Newsom) but rarely by the quotidian stuff of life, which means it’s either a bad time to be a self-absorbed singer-songwriter with routine relationship issues, or a very good one.
Mountain Goats are the nom de misery of John Darnielle, whose rise from nurse at a mental institution to lo-fi home-taping king to alarmingly prolific chronicler of his own woe has now passed into legend. At his best, Darnielle writes amazingly literate bare-bones folk songs. At his worst, he plumbs depths of gloom and self-obsession previously uncharted by even Elliott Smith, to whom he is frequently compared.
Darnielle’s last album, The Sunset Tree, was a minutely detailed and frequently wondrous examination of his abuse at the hands of his stepfather. Get Lonely, its even more inward-looking follow-up, is the most forlorn album in the world, a painful, airless account of the aftermath of a breakup that’s occasionally brilliant but frequently dull.
Darnielle specializes in conversational songs that meander endlessly in search of a payoff. For every “Woke Up New”, which examines a protagonist newly alone and at loose ends with Darnielle’s gimlet eye (“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”), several recount his adventures — like the time he tripped on the sidewalk, or visited the liquor store — without ever getting to the point.
In all its chattiness and desperation, Get Lonely isn’t without appeal; anyone going through a breakup might not want to hear anything else, except maybe Shoot Out The Lights. Everyone else might find Get Lonely easy to marvel at, but ultimately too frustrating to bear.