transcendental youth

063. Night Light

Alex Russell Transcendental Youth , , , , , , ,

 

Jenny from “All Hail West Texas” shows up in “Night Light” as a source of lost hope for a troubled narrator.

Track: “Night Light”
Album: Transcendental Youth (2012)

Transcendental Youth explodes with songs like “Harlem Roulette,” “Amy AKA Spent Gladiator 1,” and “The Diaz Brothers.” Those three are all-timers and they’re united as “fun” songs, even if they’re anthems about outcasts. The entire album is about the afflicted and the alone, but those three stand out so clearly that it can be easy to gloss over some of the slower tracks. Let’s not do that.

If “Spent Gladiator 2” is the song you play as you approach the end, “Night Light” is the song you play at night in motels stays on the drive to the end. The narrator is panicked, clearly, but possibly with good reason. “Counterfeit Florida Plates” on the same album describes a paranoid person who is actually hiding from nothing, but this person might have actual heat on them. While the “ambitious young policemen” probably aren’t real, they’re plugging in literal and metaphorical night lights because those “small dark corners” have some real evil in them.

It’s interesting that the “evil” there has to do with Jenny, a figure any Goats fan will recognize from All Hail West Texas. Jenny and our narrator have a history — we can infer that it’s romantic, but it might just as easily be a deeper dependency than that — and they have no present. She calls them from Montana, but by the end they just know “possibly Jenny’s headed east.” There’s no blame here and there’s no explanation of what happened. All we know is what the narrator tells us: Jenny is out there headed out from Montana and they’re in here using night lights to run from a darkness that’s following them around.

026. Counterfeit Florida Plates

Alex Russell Transcendental Youth , , , , , , ,

 

“Counterfeit Florida Plates” offers the listener a look into the sad life and life’s work of the insane.

Track: “Counterfeit Florida Plates”
Album: Transcendental Youth (2012)

In a way, “Counterfeit Florida Plates” is really every song the Mountain Goats have ever made. It’s the direct story of a crazy person, and you can put whatever you’d like on top of that. The narrator walks you through their madness, from stealing sunscreen from a convenience store to their life’s work of trying to spot every single fake license plate from Florida. They truly believe they’ve been tasked with his and they wait for the day when people will come ask for the data. It’s madness, but it’s a system.

“Madness” isn’t necessarily interesting on its own, but John Darnielle offers us the specifics of this person’s life and “work” to ground the character. No one in any song on Transcendental Youth has an easy time of things, but the person in “Counterfeit Florida Plates” is totally beyond help. Their plan is to wait for “the coming disaster” and their great struggle is that they can’t quite find every car they feel like they needs to find. It’s easy to feel sorry for them, but then to feel even worse when you realize that even in “success” this character will still not achieve anything.

“This may be the night my point men finally come” is the line that makes the whole song. Many Goats characters are fighting in a war that’s already been lost, but we are led to believe that this one still thinks their life has meaning. They’re missing the one trait so many other narrators have: an acknowledgement that fighting for fighting’s sake is senseless. This one still must count the cars and still must wait, hungry and cold, for people that we know aren’t ever coming.

004. Until I Am Whole

Alex Russell Transcendental Youth , , , , , , ,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bu5uQsCB4Zk

In “Until I Am Whole,” the Mountain Goats look at the first moments of depression and how we struggle to even want to feel better.

Track: “Until I Am Whole”
Album: Transcendental Youth (2012)

Until Beat the Champ comes out this year, Transcendental Youth will remain the most recent studio release by the Mountain Goats. It’s difficult to get perspective immediately on an album, and even though it’s been a few years, the tracks all still feel very recent. There’s always going to be a lot of thrashing on a Goats album, but the last few also have a lot of low-key, introspective songs about sad subsets of the populace. Transcendental Youth is the culmination of that journey.

2004’s We Shall All Be Healed is famously about John Darnielle’s time hanging out with speed freaks and other lost people in the Pacific Northwest, but the album is very specifically about drugs. From the hospital in “Mole” to the liquor store in “Against Pollution” to the quiet, terrifying interiors of “All Up the Seething Coast,” the settings on the album are all different places that drugs take the characters. We’re back in the same setting (specifically Snohomish, Washington, home of Blues Traveler’s John Popper and “the Antique Capital of the Northwest”) on Transcendental Youth, but now we’re looking at a wider scope of people.

The Mountain Goats love the unloved, and the outcasts of this album are some of the most tragic of them all. “Amy AKA Spent Gladiator 1” is John’s most recent ballad for people in temporary tough spots and “Harlem Roulette” finds a singer overdosing after a big payday. “Until I Am Whole” isn’t the saddest song on the album, but “hold my hopes underwater // stand there and watch them drown” is not the kind of message you find in a song about hope. The character doesn’t know if they can make it through this, and they’re on the precipice where they haven’t decided if they’re going to try or not.