Sunday, March 24, 2013

Destroying Angels: The Mountain Goats' Uneasy Stylistic Purity


When the new Mountain Goats album, Transcendental Youth, came out last fall, I wasn't in the country to buy a copy anyway, which is good, because if I did I would have had to face how conflicted I'd gotten about John Darnielle's folk-rock-for-jaded-nerds.
I'd sworn by the Goats for a long time, practically ever since I first heard "No Children" through the tinny speakers of an old girlfriend's Civic. The John Darnielle-model concept album spoke to me in ways that old-style concept albums hadn't—The Dark Side of the Moon and Tommy had never done anything for me, but I loved The Sunset Tree and All Hail West Texas with all my heart. I loved the big, flexible, voluble first-person voice that John Darnielle had found, and I loved swimming in his murky, decentered narratives of abuse, drug addiction and marital disintegration. John Darnielle, for me, expressed something pure and profound about human life in America; naturally I was pretty excited about Transcendental Youth when it was announced.
But just before it came out, I read a review of the first single, "Cry for Judas", on Pitchfork, and in the way a little pinprick can deflate any big balloon, I started to get queasy about the Goats. On Cry for Judas, a big, heartfelt song full of horns and anthemic choruses, Pitchfork, in its snide, sneering, vaguely Christgavian idiom, wrote something like, "If you're the kind of person who gets emotional about Mountain Goats songs, you'll probably get emotional about this song."


Like any kind of snide, sneering criticism, Pitchfork writing often intends to make its readers feel bad for having strong emotions. A lot of the accusations of hipsterdom that get hurled at the site are rooted in this operation—Pitchfork, even more than most criticism, tends to push both love and hate toward a highly qualified indifference. It's not any cooler to look down your nose at Springsteen than it is to deify TV on the Radio. But the painful truth of that kind of criticism is that it never works unless you already know, somewhere in your soul, that you really are deluding yourself, that you really do feel stronger about the  than you should. Otherwise it would bounce off. 
The truth is, there is a kind of person who gets emotional about Mountain Goats songs; it's the kind of self-conscious, depression-prone nerd who's too emotional for sneering, one-note indie but too smart for pop anthems. There's a constant tension between the need to feel deeply, in the Elliott Smith vein, and a deep suspicion of that very feeling because, after all, the last stop on the earnestness train is Doctor Who. The Mountain Goats succeed with this kind of person because their albums are crafted to feel rich, eclectic, incorporating irony and colloquialism as much as confessions. The tone of the albums, roughly, dresses up their content; the humor vindicates the pain.
So, reading that article, I realized that the irrational, fanlike love that I'd felt for John Darnielle's band was, indeed, irrational. Once you peel back the sardonic, writerly tone of the Mountain Goats, you're left with a band seemingly as indulgent as The Smiths. Overnight, whole swathes of the band's catalogue became unlistenable—most of All Hail West Texas, big chunks of The Sunset Tree, and every rock number on We Shall All Be Healed became artless, overstated and clunky. Where before I had loved the agonized payoff of "Up the Wolves" and the howled final line of "Broom People," suddenly they disgusted me the way that only bad poetry can disgust a person.
The other side of this, of course, is that the snide, sneering critic that Pitchfork's style evidently aims to ape waxes quite poetic about the Goats. Flipping through his Consumer Guide on a whim, I was shocked to find that Robert Christgau, dean of super-concentrated rock-critic jive talk, who had damned Kid A with barely articulated praise ("Alienated masterpiece nothing—it's dinner music. More claret?") and wearily waved Gimme Fiction aside ("I wish this was still a world where the right guitar noise and a heaping helping of hooks were sustenance enough") had actually been a perceptive and even rapt defender of Darnielle's band all along. Not all his reviews are positive, but of The Life of the World to Come, Christgau writes, "this is literary rock as it should be," and on Heretic Pride he goes as far as to compare Darnielle to Dylan.
And the strange thing about Christgau's criticism is that he hymns the very things that Pitchfork denigrates—Darnielle's brutal, cathartic emotion, his focused projection of his own pain onto the outside world. Christgau's approach to rock criticism is very much centered on songwriting; anybody who's spent quality time with the Consumer Guide knows how much he esteems "real songs"—that is, songs that are well-crafted and well-proportioned, but also free of bathos and affectation. Christgau is no formalist; he's every bit as keyed into the broader world of hype and fandom as Pitchfork. So Christgau's appraisal of Darnielle as a great songwriter concerns much more than Darnielle's formal talent; it's an apology for Darnielle's entire persona and, in turn, an apology for getting emotional over Mountain Goats songs.
So, I thought, if the Mountain Goats have been poisonous for me ever since I started thinking about them clearly, it can't just be because they're earnest at the core, because that's the point. The bad songs come not when they're earnest, but when they're honest, when they're pat. Being pat equals bending to received wisdom, after all, being artless, and nothing is more artless than an honest confession. So, I reasoned, if this were the case then the best Mountain Goats material would also be the most artificial, the most fictionalized. And sure enough, the best Mountain Goats material, by all accounts, is on Tallahassee.


So, back to No Children. No Children is the Platonic Mountain Goats song—at first blush it almost sounds like Simon and Garfunkel, from the spartan arrangement to the close harmonies in the chorus to the military regularity of the verse-chorus pattern, but once you drill deeper into the song it morphs before your eyes into something very different. Darnielle's lyrics are rigidly ordered, wrapped tightly around a dactylic meter and a series of metaphors, each set up and then completed economically. In No Children, the relationship is a teetering fence for two lines, then a missed exit for two, then a junkyard for four; a shaving injury for two, then a dark night for four; then, finally, asphyxiation for six, with a few tangential lines inserted here and there to let the listener breathe. Darnielle's songwriting on Tallahassee is all like this, if not always as relentlessly metric—tight, ferocious lines that imbue the Florida landscape and everything it contains with the character of the collapsing marriage. In "Old College Try," the protagonist says that the light in his lover's eyes is "like a trash can fire in a prison cell / like the searchlights in the parking lots of Hell"; in "First Few Desperate Hours," the Alpha Couple's spirits "drop like flies" and "lean like towers / on a hillside." 
This stream of metaphors is what gives Tallahassee its resonance. We know next to nothing about the couple in question, beyond the fact that they live in a decaying house and drink like sailors; the power of the album comes from the way, on songs like "Game Shows Touch Our Lives," that Darnielle's first-person narration leaps from reportage ("dug up a fifth of Hood River gin") to aphorisms ("They say friends don't destroy one another / what do they know about friends") to the pathetic fallacy ("thunder clouds forming, cream white moon / everything's gonna be okay soon"), culminating in verses that juxtapose these elements:

Carried you up the stairs that night
All of this could be yours if the price is right.
I heard cars headed down to oblivion
Up on the expressway.

Songs like this give us a view of the couple's isolated, hopeless optimism, and the way the outside world reflects it—the suffocating Florida summer and the ecosystem of Greyhound buses, overripe plums, gravel roads and junkyards. It's a romanticism worthy of Friedrich or Byron, and it has the same bipolar structure. 
In the manic songs, like "Game Shows Touch Our Lives" we get a sense that the couple's optimism masks an obvious fear that neither of them is allowed to express; more impressively, in the depressive songs like "No Children", the protagonist's bitter sarcasm masks an undimmed belief in transcendence, which is all the more heartbreaking as we appreciate the hopelessness of his situation. That hope for transcendence, usually via annihilation, is the center of the album, and it's best articulated through one verse in "No Children":

I hope the junkyard a few blocks from here 
Someday burns down
And I hope the rising black smoke carries me far away
And I never come back to this town again in my life.

The image of purgative fire is ubiquitous on the second half of the album, from "Have to Explode" to "International Small Arms Traffic Blues" to "Oceanographer's Choice" ("we're throwing off sparks"), and, oddly enough, it's beautifully articulated on "Alpha Rats' Nest," a mere bonus track, which includes the line "sing for the flames that will rip through here / and the smoke that will carry us away." The sentiment here could be a manifesto for the Mountain Goats' whole project—flying away to a better, higher world on the smoke of your own failures. And, notably, it recurs on the cover and on the final track of Transcendental Youth.

The cover of Transcendental Youth shows three ragged figures rising among the faces of demons in the night sky, trailing plumes of smoke. With the album's peripheral materials in mind (evidently it's loosely organized around a group of kids living in Washington), we can surmise that these are the eponymous Youth, and that the album is making explicit the themes that were implicit in Tallahassee—the possibility to rise above your problems simply by wallowing in them.
And the album bears that out. From song to song—from the opener "Amy AKA Spent Gladiator 1," which kicks off with "Do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive," to the Frankie Lymon elegy "Harlem Roulette," which declares that "even awful dreams are good dreams / if you're doing it right" to the eponymous closer, which restates the rising-smoke image two separate times, modified slightly with "soar ever upwards on air gone black with flies" and then played straight with "sing high while the fire climbs"—the album gradually builds up the sense that Darnielle has just decided to dispense with all of the dancing around he did on earlier albums—the trappings of autobiography in The Sunset Tree, the psalms on The Shape of the World to Come—and cut straight to the heart.
Many of the songs, in fact, feel like crystallizations of the rapid-fire metaphor technique I identified above, particularly "Spent Gladiator 2," whose verses consist of nothing but a series of similes that gradually grow in frequency. There are innumerable lines, like the one from "Alpha Rats' Nest," that could be manifestos for the band. But the essentialization of the lyrics—the loss of real fictional storylines, irony, and the gradual buildup of nature symbolism that gives Tallahassee its power—impoverishes Transcendental Youth even as it focuses it. Concentrating his songs to focus on their healing mission, Darnielle has also sterilized them.
The fact is that the tight, concentrated aphorisms and sustained, cathartic mood on Transcendental Youth, powerful as they might be, don't have the richness of Tallahassee. Meandering and discursive, Tallahassee creates a much deeper space in which to act out the ritual at the heart of the album. And that depth in many ways comes from its very distance, its very artifice.
I'd like to stress that I don't mean this to sound vulgar. It's easy to say that fiction has resonance because of the "magic of the story" or some similar claptrap, but that is manifestly bullshit; what fiction does, at least for Tallahassee, is open the piece up to different tones, different rhetorical maneuvers, and therein lies its depth. When we hymn "focus" or "purity" in art, I think it often bespeaks a deep discomfort with complexity, with internal contradictions. It might be well-intentioned, and in many cases it's brilliant, but as a facet of artistic development it tends toward the reductive. 
That, I think, is the real flaw in Transcendental Youth. Some of the individual songs are staggeringly beautiful, the instrumentation has never sounded better, and the horn charts are integrated perfectly. It's a superb album, to be clear. But if John Darnielle wants to top Tallahassee, he's going to have to disavow Transcendental Youth's laser focus. "Liminal comprehensibility," as Christgau puts it, might not be such a great thing after all.

Saturday, March 9, 2013

Melt Sounds: Miss Machine and Impersonal Construction (Modernism and Pop Music 3)

DESTROYER, THERE'LL BE ANOTHER JUST LIKE YOU

- The Dillinger Escape Plan, "Sunshine the Werewolf"

This is my third post on modernism and pop music. Check out the first two posts in the series here and here.

I stumbled upon The Dillinger Escape Plan when I was getting into metal in middle school and Between the Buried and Me's The Silent World was the heaviest record that I had ever heard.  Miss Machine had just come out and I was immediately interested when I saw reviews touting it as the brutal end of the genre.  I bought the record and immediately fell in love with it, but I was never impressed by it musically.  I was struck by it as a statement. Fair warning: if you had a hard time listening to Death Grips, it doesn't get any easier here.



In the original post that inspired me to write this series, I described Dillinger Escape Plan as an exploratory band. But it's not easy being truly experimental in metal.  They have choppy waters to navigate. The metal world, despite its increasing diversification, has often been slave to various images of inane masculinity.  From the moronic "virility" of the eighties to the tortured "pathos" of the aughts, the melodrama of metal through the ages is not hard to document.  Metal has also been a platform for every conceivable political perspective.  The genre is full of skinny metalcore guys that read Noam Chomsky's political writings alongside Game of Thrones, bizarro-country reactionaries, and unrepentant European neo-fascists. But DEP manages to deftly avoid these genre cliches and move toward something different.  Alongside their mathcore contemporaries The Locust and Daughters, DEP embrace the raw complexity of metal while eschewing the Power Rangers guitar heroics of acts like Dragonforce.  They embrace the intensity of metal while moving beyond the adolescent sentiments of their grindcore forebears.  In this respect, Miss Machine-era DEP fits cleanly into the constellation of other acts that we've covered in this series; like The Weeknd and Death Grips, they distill undertones of a genre into a well-formed and groundbreaking modern statement.

While DEP may indulge in some genre conventions, their particular brand of jazz-metal reveals the technically monstrous undergirding of the genre when the tradition and the histrionics are melted away. Like both The Weeknd and Death Grips, Dillinger Escape Plan modulates and contorts the human voice until it becomes profoundly impersonal.  I'm reminded here of their fellow mathletes Converge, whose lyrics would fit perfectly into a particularly erudite and fatalistic high school student's poetry diary, but whose vocal approach mutilates the human voice beyond recognition. Skipping away from this sort of underlying attempt at poetics and the genocidal pretensions of bands like Dimmu Borgir, DEP's lyrics display a distinctively cryptic cynicism.  Take, for example, the first lyrics of the opening track of Miss Machine, "Panasonic Youth", which reads like a mission statement for the rest of the record:

We wrote these plans, took the order, the architecture
And followed them to the end till the gears ground cold
And relentless, there was no remorse, we had none,
We kept on with no trace of a regret

Miss Machine is relevant and original because DEP realized that modern metal's narrative arc has been stuck in a rut, and conceivably entirely exhausted by the efforts of genre adventurers like Isis.  Even its literary forays have been fairly unimaginative. As captured by the lyrics above, DEP turned away from the straightforward agendas of its medium brothers and embraced the idea of metal as product.  Instead of sounding like organic compositions, the songs on Miss Machine sound like they were built.  And they weren't built with new materials; they were made out of scrap.  Any concessions to melody sound like they were cut out of another song because it was all that the bandmembers had on hand.  The "music" consistently takes a backseat to a haphazard structure.  Take, for example, "Set Fire to Sleeping Giants".  The weakest moments of this song sound like the blandest seconds of modern metal, but they're salvaged by the incorporation of careful jazz elements and a coda of unceasing hammering:



Black metal outfits have spent countless hours trying to convince us that their picture of the evil and explicitly anti-human nature of the world around us is a dangerously close look at reality.  DEP paints a much more convincing picture. They describe a world that is profoundly apersonal, consisting of melted together machines, both human and non-human.  The album cover of Miss Machine is instructive here:

Miss Machine cover art

In "Sunshine the Werewolf", Greg Puciato yelps "We fucked like a nuclear war".  In DEP's modernity, weapons, machines, and people overlap and muddle, bringing catastrophe to orgasm and vice versa.  This is not to say that Miss Machine represents a clean break from every record before it.  As mentioned above, DEP's originality is born from their commitment to the genre that birthed them. They managed to capture, for a moment, the ends and the limits of the genre of which they are a part.