2021: Dark in Here
[This is the last of the articles on the Mountain Goats’ albums, for now. Next Friday, though, I’m going to start publishing, twice a week, a series of mini-articles on my 20 favorite Mountain Goats songs, starting from 20 and counting down to 1.—GS]
Why does Dark in Here feel so different? Its songs were written in summer 2019, just like the songs on Getting into Knives, and it was recorded a week after Getting into Knives, but as soon as the band started making selected songs available online before the release—“Mobile,” “The Slow Parts on Death Metal Albums,” “Dark in Here”—it was clear that this was going to be a very different kind of experience. Part of the reason is that the lineup changed: in Memphis, Bram Gielen (piano, keyboards, guitars) and Chris Boerner (guitars) played on a lot of the songs, but in Muscle Shoals, it was mostly “just the four of us,” Hughes wrote.1 It also has something to do with the fact that Shani Ghandi mixed the album; Ross-Spang, who mixed Getting into Knives, is no slouch, but the song-sensitivity of Ghandi, working with layers and layers of instruments and voices, is next level. There’s other little things I notice: Darnielle isn’t selling his vocal performances as much as he had on Getting into Knives, for example, and there are more key modulations and major-minor transitions than usual, and I don’t think there have every been this many showcased chords on one of their albums (more on those things later).
But the biggest shift is lyrical. Darnielle separated out his summer 2019 songs on the basis of “which ones felt like they played well together,” and the Dark in Here songs are, for whatever reason, much more aligned with one another than the Getting into Knives songs are. They have very similar “heres,” for one thing:
A tunnel or sewer beneath the streets of Paris (“Parisian Enclave”)
The deepest hole in the world (“The Destruction of the Kola Superdeep Borehole Tower”)
A balcony in Mobile, Alabama where someone is praying for their death (“Mobile”)
A cave or something where someone is hiding and getting ready to kill as many of his pursuers as he can (“Dark in Here”)
A series of city locations—apartment, train, rooftop—where someone who is almost invisible to others is trying to get noticed (“Lizard Suit”)
A deserted shoreline where some people are trying to get away from a powerful animal (“When a Powerful Animal Comes”)
A forest road where a headless horseman rides back and forth (“To the Headless Horseman”)
A hidden lab where scientists are creating monsters that will rise from bodies of water (“The New Hydra Collection”)
A metal concert where someone who has come alone is dancing (“The Slow Parts on Death Metal Albums”)
A desecrated religious site where slaughtered young men lie face up in a pit (“Before I Got There”)
An unknown place and time in which someone is singing about someone who has just died (“Arguing with the Ghost of Peter Laughner about His Coney Island Baby Review”)
A series of places—destroyed house, Manhattan penthouse, body of water—where someone is hoping to slip into another plane of existence (“Let Me Bathe in Demonic Light”)
And it’s emphatically dark in those heres. There’s a permanent shadow in “Parisian Enclave,” a dark whale-belly in “Mobile,” a pitch-black cloaking in “Dark in Here,” a nighttime rooftop in “Lizard Suit,” kids moving by night in “When a Powerful Animal Comes,” and on and on like that. When Darnielle talks about Dark in Here, he sometimes focuses on a metaphorical version of that darkness, which he associates with “calamity.”2 I’m much more affected by the literal absence of light in these scenarios, though, and by the marginality of the locations. It gives me a half-regressed feeling of hiding from someone who is seeking me, wanting to remain unfound, but wanting, also, to appear. Part of the reason why the songs play well together is that most of the characters in them are playing the same game.
In dark or near-dark conditions, things never appear strictly as themselves, not at first anyway. In the opening of “Mobile,” for example, the person who is singing is barely comprehensible, and getting to know him seems to depend on learning how to see him by way of someone else:
Jonah went down to the docks to flee from the wrath of the Lord
But the mark on his forehead was visible to everybody on board
They threw him down into the water, but he did not drown
I’m on a balcony in Mobile, Alabama, waiting for the wind to throw me down
Or more than one someone else: Cain, not Jonah, is the biblical character who received, as punishment, a mark on his forehead that meant that he could not be killed.3 The speaker of the song obviously wants to be killed by God, or God in a hurricane. He doesn’t want to hide from God, he doesn’t want to be hidden. But the Lord doesn’t see him, or doesn’t show that he sees him, or is blind, or doesn’t exist. “Lord, if you won’t keep me safe and warm,” the speaker sings in the first bridge, “then send down the storm, send down the storm.” Just be present, even if your presence annihilates me. But no. The chords cycle smoothly, new-Mountain-Goats style, with extensions and voicings that expand the basic D-G-A, G-C-D progressions into D-G-Asus4/E, G-Cadd9-D/A, while McFarlane plays figures that bring Bonnie Raitt to mind (he played in her band for years). For weeks, I listened the song early in the morning, because I could hear it better then, could hear, in a woozy, pre-experiential way, what it’s asking for. “May I address the foreman of the jury?” the speaker sings in the second bridge (Bm-G-D). “Why do you hold back your fury?/Don’t hold back your fury.” In each of the song’s three-chord sequences, the last chord is held for twice as long as either of the first two, so that you hear inside the song a kind of one-two-three . . . ., one-two-three . . . . rhythm, a lonely nothing, a quiet, at the end of the line. Cul-de-sac and repeat, cul-de-sac and repeat. In the near-darkness, it can sometimes seem like the person you’re struggling to make out is you.
This is how Dark in Here works when it’s working really well; you don’t know what’s going on until at some point you do, even though your eyes haven’t totally adjusted to the light conditions yet. Only after a lot of times through the album did I get that the speaker of “The Slow Parts on Death Metal Albums” is driving home high, on heroin, apparently. That could just be because I was being dense. “Half-life of my toxins,” the speaker sings at the beginning of the second verse, “Difficult to calculate/Stock up on gauze in case of accidents/Try to keep my story straight.” But it might also be because the “mid-tempo pulse” of the song, as Hughes describes it, combined with the repeated, foregrounded key modulations, was putting me a state in which the lyrics were like a tributary into that total river.4 I like it that way; I like listening in a sort of daze, thinking things like, “are there slow parts on death metal albums?” and “I would probably listen for them too, if there were,” and “maybe the slow parts are just the parts where the drummer plays eighth notes instead of sixty-fourth notes,” and, eventually, “maybe something in him is slowing the game down.” Darkness is good for imagining, especially if it’s drifty imagining (Every dream’s a good dream, even awful dreams are good dreams/If you’re doing it right). The things that become visible to you when you’re in that state are, in most cases, things that nobody else would have shown you. That’s the benefit of not fitting in, for the near-autobiographical speaker of “The Slow Parts on Death Metal Albums.”5 It’s the benefit of “never under any circumstances being comfortable,” which is how Darnielle has described what it’s like to be the speaker of “Lizard Suit.” In the bright, uninterrupted daylight, things just are what they are, to you and to everyone else. In the darkness, though, everything is different. “Let me dance ’til I die,” Darnielle sings. “Turn the volume up high and listen to the slow parts.”
Sometimes all it takes to start listening like that is a little mid-song surprise—a chord, for instance, that you didn’t hear coming the first time and that you listen for every time afterwards. In “When a Powerful Animal Comes,” everything pivots on a sick F7 that arrives right after each of the three verses and hangs there for a little while before the chorus starts. While it’s up there, the game slows down, the anticipation rises, and the simple iambs at the beginnings of the choruses—“We’ve MADE misTAKES,” “The TREEline SHAKES,” and, especially, “BeHOLD, the BEAST aWAKES”—sort of jolt you.6 In both “Parisian Enclave” and “Before I Got There,” Darnielle plays the major version of a chord and then, unexpectedly, descends to the minor version of the same chord, which occupies sadder, weightier emotional territories. “Rats (Em7) re- (E7) turn- (Am) ing home to (C) our NEST (D),” he sings at the end of the first verse of “Parisian Enclave,” and then, at the beginning of the chorus, “Beneath the STREETS (Dm) of the city with my breth- (E7) ren, in the never-ending sha- (Am) dows.” It’s a little less obvious than that in “Before I Got There,” a piano song in Ab with Wurster and Hughes behind it and Douglas, on clarinet and flute, all around it. In the verses, the showcased chord in the progression is a C7 (And the TAPestry above . . . Now ilLEGible forever). At the end of the verses, though, when a four-bar C# finally surrenders to the beginning of the chorus, it drops to a Cm7 (ALL of this . . .). Those moments, and others like them, resonate with one another, and the more you listen to them, the more they become, like slow parts, places that you can get lost in. Or like dark parts, maybe, places that are full of sadness and possibility. It’s important, I think, that the subtitle of Dark in Here is “12 songs for singing in caves, bunkers, foxholes, and secret places beneath the floorboards.”7 What holds the album together, and distinguishes from Getting into Knives, is everything that that suits it to circumstances like those, everything slow, minor, dark, and hidden in it.
Which is why “Arguing with the Ghost of Peter Laughner about His Coney Island Baby Review” is such a crucial part of the album. It’s the only song without a specified location for its speaker, and if you don’t find out by other means that it’s about David Berman, the one-time leader of Silver Jews, who hung himself in the summer of 2019 at the age of 52, the lyrics are going to seem pretty opaque to you.8 And yet, because it’s a kind of meta-song about slow, minor, dark, hidden imaginative activities, it can make you aware of why those activities are worth caring about. Wurster, I think, counts it off, and as soon as it starts you can hear that Darnielle is letting Ross-Spang and Ghandi do their thing, trusting that they are attuned to the song, that they have its best interests in mind. Over slow-beat measures, accompanied by guitars, bass, drums, a shaker, and an organ, Darnielle sings, in a high, vulnerable voice, “Just imagine a time and place/Sentient objects adrift in space.” The chords are really basic, ringing Gs and Cmaj7s, so when a Dadd11/A (A-D-F#-G-D-x) ripples out, the whole atmosphere changes. “Trying to do the needful math,” Darnielle sings, as the chord changes to a C/E, “Trying to find the secret path,” and then he’s back to the Gs and Cmaj7s: “Seas gone silent in the spiral shell when you fell.” Something vast and beautiful, something that surges forth in lots of people but surged wildly and unrepeatably forth in Berman, is no longer a part of our world. It’s hard to bear. When Darnielle gets to the end of the last verse and sings, “Systems closing down on several fronts/You will always have been here once,” there’s an extra push in his voice on the word “once.” There’s a lot of grief in that sound. But there’s a defiant kind of joy in it too. “We were here once, me and my friends,” Darnielle sings in “Steal Smoked Fish.” “You only see it once and it steals into the dawn/And then it’s gone forever,” he sings in “Genesis 30:3.” This magic moment, this life, one time only. All hail.
Thanks to Ross-Spang’s connections with older musicians, the band was able to bring in the legendary organist Spooner Oldham for two afternoons and the guitarist Will McFarlane for one. They only played live on three of the album’s live takes, though: “Mobile,” “Dark in Here,” and “The Destruction of the Kola Superdeep Borehole Tower” (just Oldham on the last one).
In the liner notes, Darnielle wrote, “if you’re looking for a governing theme here, it’s calamity, as all the songs are either anticipating one or reflecting one that’s already happened.”
“But the Lord said to him, ‘Not so; anyone who kills Cain will suffer vengeance seven times over.’ Then the Lord put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him” (Genesis 4:15, New International Version).
What I’m describing as key modulations are moments when the root chord, the chord that feels like home base, is switched out. In “The Slow Parts on Death Metal Albums,” we start in Gm, and then a wipe sequence (F-Bb-Eb-Bb) makes it possible to land on Eb as the new root chord, and sing, “Jumping out of my skin, this tiny sector can’t contain me/Suit up in a flash, slipping symbols bravely, bravely,” landing, at that point, on a Bb, which now seems like the new root chord. But then, before the next line starts, there’s another wipe sequence (Bb-F/A-Bb-Dm), setting up a drop into a home-like Cm for “Go where I’m not wanted/Stand where the light hits hard/Almost full grown, drive home alone and listen to the slow parts.” On “slow parts,” we go back to Gm, and the whole thing starts over. And don’t get me started on the bridge.
“All songs end up being autobiographical if you take the long view, but ‘The Slow Parts on Death Metal Albums’ is probably the most directly confessional song of this bunch,” Darnielle wrote in the liner notes. According to an interviewer for Columbus Alive, it originated in his memory of going to “a Megadeth concert at Fender’s Ballroom in Long Beach, California, around 1986, and while everyone around him had the long-haired, glammy look of a heavy metal hesher, [he] had short hair and wore jeans with a blazer and tie. He didn’t fit in, but he wasn’t lonely, either” (Joel Oliphant, “The Mountain Goats find ecstasy amid the darkness,” Columbus Alive, 25 August 2021).
The F7 only has that effect in context, obviously. The context, if you’re keeping score at home, is a beautiful but non-bluesy progression in the preceding verses: Bdim/F-Am/E-G/C-F/G, D-Am-C-F, G-Am-C-F. There’s another big moment of dilation at the beginning of the bridge, when the key modulates to A major and the speaker, the collective voice of these “lost kids,” sings, “See soft peaks off in the distance/Those people in the mountains, they will never know what hit them.” On the word “never,” an E major drops to an Em, which paves the way to the return to F. The kids are “roll[ing] hard along some long odds” at this moment; they had been traveling only at night, but now it’s daybreak and they’re still out there, looking around. And then the beast appears between them and the sun.
It might seem like it’s on the model of All Hail West Texas, whose subtitle is “fourteen songs about seven people, two houses, a motorcycle, and a locked treatment facility for adolescent boys,” but in the unboxing video, Darnielle connects it to The Coroner’s Gambit, which has a subtitle—“or Slavonic Dances, if you prefer”—and then a sub-subtitle: “Sixteen new songs from your earnest friends, the Mountain Goats, to be sung at the base of trees in Vancouver, Bombay, New Albany, Hull, Delft, Dar-es-Salaam, et cetera.”
If you’re curious about Berman, I strongly suggest that you listen to Silver Jews’ “Pet Politics,” which Darnielle covered in 2005 and played live several times. By the way, I realize that it’s perverse of me not to talk about “The Destruction of the Kola Superdeep Borehole Tower,” which I love. I don’t know what to tell you.