John Darnielle, a.k.a. The Mountain Goats, is often called a poet. While he deserves the compliment implied by that label, his talents have more in common with those of a short-story writer.
Consider "Harlem Roulette." Here we have a wisp of a narrative about Frankie Lymon, who died in 1968 of an overdose, just after recording a melancholy tune about "a little town / Where the stars shine bright / And the moon never drowns." Smartly, though, Darnielle never quite tells the story - never shows us Lymon shutting himself in his grandmother's bathroom and plunging a needle into his arm. Instead, Darnielle circles around the tragedy, touching on a few pungent, suggestive images. Engines beneath the city. A New York summer night. Armies in the distance.
As if trying and failing to grasp the meaning of his own song, Darnielle perseverates on an enigmatic declaration: "The loneliest people in the whole wide world / Are the ones you're never going to see again." Who's lonelier: the people observed, or the observer?
And then, in an unexpected middle eight, he flips to the present with shattering specificity: "Four hours north of Portland, a radio flips on, / And some no one from the future remembers that you're gone." Denis Johnson could hardly have done better.
"Every dream's a good dream, / Even awful dreams are good dreams, / If you're doing it right."
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