In the introduction to Tiny Beautiful Things, a collection of Cheryl Strayed's advice columns, the writer Steve Almond uses the term "radical empathy." I underlined it and wrote in the margins of the book "John Darnielle." I cannot think of two words that better sum up the strange powers that the Mountain Goats frontman has spent two decades and a small shelf's worth of LPs tirelessly honing. "Radical" because the space he's carved out in the musical landscape ("I hide down in my corner, because I like my corner," he seethes on the opening cut of his latest album, Transcendental Youth) stands a sizable and defiant distance from what's cool. His songs hinge upon lines ("Every dream's a good dream, even awful dreams are good dreams if you're doing it right") that would run the risk of sounding like the inspirational posters that lined the walls of your 9th grade English teacher's classroom if Darnielle delivered them with anything less than the tenacity of a rabid dog playing tug-of-war for the last bone on earth. And "empathy" because the degree to which he inhabits his characters is so thorough that it's a little disorienting. We are talking about a guy who has written from the perspective of a 4th-century Danish peasant, a gun-clutching Macon County outlaw, an agoraphobic science fiction novelist, and a moon-dwelling cannibal and has still somehow tricked most people into thinking that he is "a confessional songwriter."
Since retiring his boombox and committing to a full-band sound in 2002, Mountain Goats albums have roughly fallen into two categories, what I'll sort-of-inadequately call "tight concept" and "loose concept." The former are bound by narratives or formal conceits-- That Record About The Painfully Slow Dissolution of A Marriage (Tallahassee), That Secular Record About The Bible (The Life of the World to Come), That Record About What Happens When Junkies Living In A House Together Stop Being Polite And Start Getting Real (We Shall All Be Healed). The latter category-- records like Heretic Pride and All Eternals Deck-- is more of a mixed bag: They don't quite have the blunt impact of the tighter concept albums, but the upside is that they give Darnielle's imagination some room, freeing him to whip around from consciousness to troubled consciousness. And Transcendental Youth, the Mountain Goats' latest, is a fine example of that latter category. As they hide out from the cops, root through garbage, peer paranoid through the blinds, and dig their nails into their hands just for something to do, its protagonists are linked not by place or time but by a particular spiritual stance-- crouched and desperate, but waiting patiently for a sliver of light.
For as attuned as Darnielle is to the desperation of the everyman, his music's humanism extends to honoring the pathos of famous people. (A sampling of song titles from All Eternals Deck: "For Charles Bronson" and "Liza Forever Minnelli.") Two of Transcendental Youth's best songs-- both of which rank among the most searing and immediate things he's written since The Sunset Tree-- were inspired by troubled musicians who didn't live to see better days. Darnielle wrote "Amy aka Spent Gladiator 1" after Amy Winehouse died, but he says the song is for "all the other Amy Winehouses in the world who aren't famous, whose deaths go uncelebrated." With its driving, obstinate tempo and pithily life-affirming proclamations ("Do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive"), "Amy" is one of the more anthemic songs the Mountain Goats have put to tape, and it has potential to become a staple in the band's fabled and cathartic live shows. It's perhaps the highest compliment one can bestow upon a Mountain Goats song to say that it has lyrics that would feel really good to scream at the top of your lungs in a room full of hundreds of other people who are also screaming at the top of their lungs; by that measure, "Amy"'s chorus of "Just stay aliiiiive" ranks pretty high.
The terrific "Harlem Roulette", on the other hand, whips us back in time to 1968, where Frankie Lymon is in a Harlem studio putting the finishing touches on a song called "Seabreeze". Darnielle has a knack for the fine balance between hyper-specificity and universality, and the power of "Harlem Roulette" comes from the way it whiplashes between external banalities ("Just a pair of tunes to hammer out/ Everybody's off the clock by 10") and hulking, private tragedies (a beat later: "The loneliest people in the whole wide world are the ones you're never going to see again.") It's also a song about the gulf between appearance and reality: Someone who'd seemingly achieved a great deal and tons of adoration at a young age can still be one of the loneliest people in the world (Stars! They're Just Like Us!), and what seemed like an ordinary studio session became, in retrospect, tragic. Lymon went home from the studio, took his first hit of heroin in years, and, at the age of 25, overdosed.
The debate's been raging since 2002: At this point it's safe to say that there will always be people who think the Mountain Goats' urgent, lo-fi sound was better suited to transmit stories that raw. But Transcendental Youth does have one wrinkle that adds some emotion range-- a horn section, arranged expressively by up-and-coming avant-symphonic artist Matthew E. White (an omnivorous music fan who leapt at the chance to induldge his inner Mingus, Darnielle recruited White after seeing him perform live with Sounds of the South, a show featuring Justin Vernon, Phil Cook, and Megafaun and admiring his 60s-inspired compositions). They're a fitting addition because, like Darnielle's lyrics, the emotions they transmit are complex and many-hued. The brass is bright but defiant on the upbeat "Cry for Judas", as well as the muted, stunning closer "Transcendental Youth". "Sing, sing for ourselves alone," Darnielle commands, and the horns shine like sunsets or sunrises, hellfire or salvation-- you're never quite sure.
Song for song, Transcendental Youth doesn't have the consistency of the Mountain Goats' strongest records, and it lacks both variation and character motivation around the middle. "White Cedar", "Until I Am Whole", and "Night Light" are powerful but strike similar emotional chords and end up feeling like a mid-album lull. There's also a vividness of external detail that feels missing from some of these songs: The narrator of the stirring but vague "White Cedar" "woke up on lockdown," but in a classic Mountain Goats song we'd know exactly what he did to get there. Not every character on Transcendental Youth is as memorable as the stars-- the Alpha Couple, the fallen high school running back or the Denton Death Metal dudes-- of the band's sterling back catalog, not every line as immediate or cathartic to yell as fan favorite "No Children"'s "I hope you die! I hope we both die!" But in the moments when he articulates the trivialities and tragedies of his narrators most convincingly, Darnielle finds equal grains of humanity and empathy in people crouched in the darkest corners and blinded by the brightest spotlights. It's not spirituality, escapism, or even optimism, exactly, that he's espousing-- all you know is it's some kind of light.
