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.