Listening Post: The Mountain Goats - Tallahassee

The Mountain Goats - Tallahassee - 2002

There are a few great pieces of art that make you realize that you will never be able to achieve...that. For some it's Van Gogh. For others it's Gatsby.
For me it's, among many other things, John Darnielle's Mountain Goats album Tallahassee.
See, I'm a sucker for artists who create a character and keep them going, examining their lives for the duration. Dave Sim's 30+ year odyssey that was Cerebus is a great example. Trudeau's Doonesbury another. And the "alpha" couple in Darnielle's work. That he keeps going back to that well to examine these people is startling and amazing.
And, after years of that he devoted an entire album to them. Tallahassee is about the alpha couple moving to that town, buying a house sight unseen and drinking themselves to their end.
Mountain Goats albums sound like Mountain Goats albums. Darnielle's guitar loves a certain 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2 rhythm (among others) and his voice is almost repellently nasal. But the songs...the songs...Alpha Couple are those people you are afraid that you might turn into with a turn of bad luck or an illness, like the mother/daughter in Grey Gardens. I don't know if I know any Alpha Couples because I imagine they disappear into their own oblivion.

A song like "No Children" begs the question "How did they get here?" and, better, "What were they like when they met? Was it ever good?" Because it's a harrowingly depressing song. Take the opening verse:
I hope that our few remaining friends
Give up on trying to save us
I hope we come up with a failsafe plot
To piss off the dumb few that forgave us
I hope the fences we mended
Fall down beneath their own weight
And I hope we hang on past the last exit
I hope it's already too late
And I hope the junkyard a few blocks from here
Someday burns down
And I hope the rising black smoke carries me far away
And I never come back to this town
Again in my life
I hope I lie
And tell everyone you were a good wife
And I hope you die
I hope we both die

If that doesn't make you want to slit your wrists....I just don't know. You can't just put Tallahassee on in the background and do something else. The record demands that you pay attention. You couldn't surf the web or do your taxes while reading a book and that's what this is: a book. A novel.

There's no way to pick just one song on Talahassee, because they aren't really meant to be heard as singles. The entire cycle works like Drive By Truckers' Southern Rock Opera; all part of one great book. I don't know what happens to our heroes. I assume from the website for the album, based on the notes in the attic, that they drank themselves to death or that they used the poisons in the garden and committed suicide. "Old College Try" sort of gives me that suicide pact feeling as well.

Grade: A
ASide: Tallahassee, No Children, See America Right, Alpha Rats Nest
BlindSide: Idylls of the King, Peacocks, Oceanographer's Choice