The last time John Darnielle and Franklin Bruno released an album as a duo, it was way back in 2002, and they called themselves the Extra Glenns. That album, Martial Arts Weekend, served as a sort of test case for Darnielle's progression beyond his acoustic-guitar-and-boom-box years. Later that year, Darnielle's Mountain Goats released Tallahassee on 4AD, thus beginning their long and gradual transformation into an actual band. Darnielle and fellow veteran singer-songwriter Bruno haven't exactly been strangers since Martial Arts Weekend; I've seen Bruno join Darnielle onstage at at least a couple of shows. They're old friends, and this new record doesn't sound like a test case for anything. It sounds like a great novelist kicking out a book of short stories, just to shake out all the loose ideas he's had bouncing around in his head.
Most recent Mountain Goats albums have central themes or ideas or moods; they're not concept albums, exactly, but the songs seem intertwined in some ephemeral way. If Undercard has a central theme, it's this: people mired in mediocrity who find themselves trapped in desperate circumstances. "Cruiserweights" is an expertly rendered depiction of a boxer fighting in some shitty, inconsequential mid-80s Cleveland arena, feeling himself get pounded into liquid even though he realizes nobody's watching and that his fight is of little consequence. "Only Existing Footage" is a postcard from a doomed B-movie set. Even the album's lone cover, of Randy Newman's "In Germany Before the War", is a pretty mundane image of the killer from Fritz Lang's M.
Maybe the starkest illustration of the beaten-down comes from Bruno and works as a snapshot of one man's feelings in the moments following an adultery-induced car crash. The title of "How I Left the Ministry" tells us one little biographical nugget about the narrator that you won't get from the lyrics themselves, and the liner notes shed even more light: He's actually the leader of "one of those franchised evangelical churches that dot San Bernadino County." The liner notes of Undercard are generally a whole lot of fun: Darnielle and Bruno offering shards of commentary about every song-- sometimes revealing big, important things, sometimes not. The whole thing underscores the idea that these two are good friends who love writing, and who love writing together.
In its spare, sparkling production and its generally hushed tone, Undercard could musically pass for a new Mountain Goats record easily, especially as Darnielle sings the lead on every song. But there are some unexpected flourishes here, some of which work (the strum-stomp simplicity of "Dogs of Clinic 17", which actually reminds me of Against Me!), and some of which don't (the intrusively jazzy acoustic-guitar stabs on "Rockin' Rockin' Twilight of the Gods"). Bruno sings harmony from time to time, and it's a kick to hear someone trying to harmonize with Darnielle's knotty yip and actually succeeding. But as with so many Darnielle-related projects, the words are what stick with you here. And even if there's no transcendent statement to be found, we're still left with these guys sketching out their own little Richard Brautigan short stories, rendering entire lives in quick, mysterious, devastating little strokes. If these guys wanted to make another one of these before another eight years elapse, I wouldn't be mad.
