On Thursday I received Undercard, the latest project by Mountain Goats front man John Darnielle, but this time under the name The Extra Lens and created in collaboration with Frank Bruno.
I spent way too much time in the car over the past couple of days, which has given me a chance to listen through the album three or four times. Ok, so, I may have taken the long way to work on purpose… er… to avoid traffic and make sure I got through the whole thing before getting to my destination.
A Darnielle album is like a short story collection. You are going to be hearing stories put in verse. These stories are fraught with symbolism and meaning. I am once again reminded of one of my favorite Flannery O’Connor quotes:
“A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.”
In the case of Undercard, the story collection is more like a Tobias Wolf montage than, say, Dubliners. The advertisements for Undercard were characteristically self-effacing: “…the project began as a potential home for any song John wrote that had a) more than three chords or b) a bridge.” But the musical complexity of this album isn’t merely that there are more instruments, more complex tunes, or “a bridge.” There is some of that.
But what makes this album so great is that the diversity of musical styles is so broad that it sounds at times like it could be a mix CD representing four or five different bands. That’s what I mean by the work being more like a Wolf compilation and less like Dubliners.
With each passing song you find yourself in a completely new setting, in stories that intentionally span over 75 years, numerous countries,
and with that corresponding musical styles. From the sorrowful, piano accompanied and accordion-tinged, “In Germany Before the War,” to “Rockin’ Rockin’ Twilight of the Gods” with its 70s esque guitar accents, to the driving-rock lead guitar of “Adultery,” to “Cruiserweights” with its more Mtn Goat-esque lyrically driven feel, the album takes you all over the place. And that’s a good thing.
What about the lyrics themselves?
As happens often in Darnielle’s work, the stories somtimes take time to sink in and make themselves understood. And sometimes, the storyline is clear enough but what they communicate isn’t clear until you put the lyrics together with the title. For example, one song tells the somewhat troubling storyline of a guy who gets into an accident en route to check into a hotel with his neighbor’s wife. That’s one level of the story. Then you read the title, “How I Left the Ministry,” and you’re sent back, first with, “Yeah, that’d do it…” and then also to think about the tones in which the story is told. Is this a celebration or a lament?
One thing I love about Darnielle’s work is that he is never going to b.s. you about the painful ramifications of the decisions we make. Too often in television, story, and music, adulterous affairs are told as joyful moments of self-discovery with little overarching indication of the destruction such actions work. “Adultery”, the first track on this album, will have no such sentimentalizing.
You can read more and listen to a preview at the NPR website.
You can also stream it at the Merge records cite.
If you’re really cool, you can grab a copy on vinyl.
Or, if you’re only moderately old school, you can order the CD.
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