4ad / Ada
2006
Get Lonely
About This Album
Coming off of the two strongest, most fully realized -- and most harrowing -- albums of his career, in particular The Sunset Tree, which helped bring him to the attention of a larger audience, John Darnielle (who's somewhat better known as the Mountain Goats) took something of a career digression with a record that, while retaining the production clarity and expanded instrumental palette of his 4AD output to date, marked a clear withdrawal, if not in quality, certainly in scope, from its phenomenal predecessors. Thematically at least, Get Lonely is the sparest, bleakest record in the Mountain Goats' discography. Much was made of the unprecedentedly autobiographical content of The Sunset Tree and We Shall All Be Healed, and it is true that they conveyed a sustained emotional potency that was largely new to Darnielle's repertory, but both contained so many lyrical loose ends, disjointed perspectives, and ambiguous imagery that it was difficult if not impossible to glean any consistent context in them, let alone a coherent through-line. Get Lonely, on the other hand, is practically monotonous in its lyrical focus. Every one of its songs features a first-person narrator in a state of desolation, near-desperation, solitude (always), and grappling, more or less explicitly, with the psychic effects of recent loss: extreme listlessness, emotional paralysis, intermittent attempts at deterministic redirection; nightmarish delirium.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4 and 12)

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