Yo La Tengo. Fall Out Boy. And, upon the release of her third album, Bury Me at Makeout Creek, Mitski. These three are just about the only rock musicians to successfully reference The Simpsons (we’ll leave out metalcore bros Evergreen Terrace for a number of reasons)—a small group considering the show's incalculable influence on people who listen to indie-rock. Here’s some context for this particular nod: the cosmic punching bag Milhouse undergoes a fake faith healing ritual that he believes has restored his vision. Caught up in a rapturous song and dance number, he is promised a rare romantic tryst at the apocryphal Makeout Creek. He then gets hit by a truck. With his last bit of breath, he says this album title.
That more or less mirrors the narrative arc here. Opener “Texas Reznikoff” establishes contemporary comparisons—Mitski’s broad, tremulous vocals and sly humor recall Angel Olsen, while the equal split between unencumbered acoustic pining and pummeling, mid-fi indie rock respectively aligns her with labelmates Frankie Cosmos and LVL UP. And it lays out a compact scene of domestic bliss, littered with specificities—a lover who wears socks in bed, reads Objectivist poetry, and serves as the breeze in her Austin nights. The final acknowledgement of romantic contentment occurs less than three minutes into Bury Me at Makeout Creek and by its bitter end, the only thing that can bring Mitski comfort is the thought of dying with a clean apartment (“They’ll think of me kindly/When they come for my things”).
The way an outsider might view her narrator is duly noted just by the loaded title of “Townie”—this is someone who’s stuck around far too long after the party ended and almost certainly has a distorted perspective as to whether it was any fun to begin with. “Townie” previews a horrible night out with all the protraction and morbid glee of a suicide pact. Her images are startlingly violent—she wants a love that falls like a body from the balcony, she’s holding her breath with a baseball bat. Guzzling a toxic Pinkerton cocktail of redlining distortion, white-hot self pity, and sing-along hooks, Mitski shouts, “I’m not gonna be what my daddy wants me to be… I’m gonna be what my body wants me to be,” a call for freedom that’s galvanizing from a teenage perspective, but increasingly sad as songs like “I Don’t Smoke” and “Drunk Walk Home” lay out the terrible life plan the body of this self-described 25 year-old “tall child” has for her.
Though not necessarily nostalgia, the sound of Bury Me at Makeout Creek is inventive and resourceful in a ’90s-indie way. The choruses here soar like power pop, but are subdued by tempo and fidelity, while cheap drum machines are deployed as much for their tone as their rhythm. And even when Bury Me has full band arrangements, everything calls attention to the narrator’s loneliness—awkwardly thumbed basslines, slapdash drumming, a mocking chorale on “Carry Me Out,” organ drones that could pass for someone nodding off on the keys.
But anything that gives you the sense of amateurism or self-defeat has intent and purpose. As tempting as it is to praise Bury Me at Makeout Creek by trying to quantify its intangibles—charm, relatability—the craft here is obvious, as is the accruing confidence of someone who’s developed a compelling voice in obscurity. Mitski can lay on the emo melodrama (“One word from you/And I would jump off of this ledge I’m on, baby”) just enough so things aren’t too real and mundane, and while these songs are first-person and personal, they’re meant for an audience. It’s fitting to see a mutual respect between herself and Joyce Manor, whose Never Hungover Again is a similarly fantastic record of pop gems about choosing self-pity over feeling nothing at all and finding a kind of pleasurable agency in it. And, as a result, Mitski Miyawaki is starting to gain a bit of separation from her band; Bury Me at Makeout Creek still sounds like a breakthrough even if nothing’s coming up Mitski in these songs.
