There are lots of different types of bars out there, but most fall into one of two categories. First, you've got your hip, stylish establishments, the kind college kids hang at every night from Thursday to Saturday to get wasted and possibly to score with some stranger they'll never see again. And then there's the other kind, the local dive off the interstate or secluded on a neighborhood sidestreet, where the bartender knows most of the faces and the troubles those faces have known.
If his music is any indication, Mike Johnson spends most of his time in the latter kind of establishment, drowning his sorrows nightly in a foamy stein and conveniently forgetting that the guy handing him drinks isn't a licensed therapist. The place he haunts isn't exactly Cheers, either-- you're unlikely to hear a lot of clever one-liners and it's probably not quite so immaculately kept up. Yet, unlike most of the denizens of this consoling tavern, Johnson happens to spend most of the rest of his time with an instrument in his hand, hanging out with guys like Phil Ek and Mark Lanegan.
He's actually been tolling around the Pacific Northwest for about a decade and a half now, starting out in the little-known Snakepit before playing bass in Dinosaur Jr throughout most of the 90s. Aptly, he's also been one of the principle forces behind Mark Lanegan's post-Screaming Trees work, which is just about the closest thing I can think of to his own solo work. Johnson's forlorn baritone also occasionally conjures up a more restrained Mark Eitzel, or even Nick Cave at his most subdued.
Johnson's fourth solo album, and first since 1998's I Feel Alright, picks right up where he last left us. That is, in an emotional ditch, crushed by the weight of relationships that didn't last and light that's struggling to poke through thick clouds of dread and disgust. Sure, anyone at all familiar with his stuff isn't going to expect the feelgood hit of the summer, but here the morose delivery sometimes gets a little overbearing, as it's hard to find a break anywhere.
Thankfully, the persistence of the man's mopes is largely offset by the quality of the material. Johnson has an odd approach to songwriting, setting a mood first, and then extracting a narrative from it. Ek's production is friendly and inviting, framing each of Johnson's songs so that they reveal themselves slowly, growing with each listen. The hook for opener "Arise" ingratiates itself so subtly that you'll hardly even notice it's happened until you find yourself humming it at work a few days later.
By and large, Johnson couches his themes in a backdrop of rock-stained country and folk, though it's never firmly in either territory. He breaks out of dirge mode here and there, most notably on "Come Back Again", which, while not exactly jaunty itself, manages to charge things up nicely with some startlingly anthemic guitar work and an unusually animated vocal performance. The whole thing ends with what could be a pompous disaster, featuring Johnson dryly reading a passage from the Purgatory section of Dante's Divine Comedy, but the music that rises behind him and eventually overwhelms him is so spirited and unpretentious that it actually elevates the mood, capping things on a markedly positive note.
Though not his best, What Would You Do is another solid effort from Johnson, who by now has developed a fairly impressive little canon of downtrodden songs and a fairly distinct gothic country musical calling card for himself. A pretty good companion, really, for emotional distress during those times when a friendly bartender's nowhere to be found. It's better for your liver, anyway.
