(crumb) A review of The Mountain Goats' "Babylon Springs EP"
This little 5-song EP spanning 17-odd minutes was released in 2006. I think this EP was released during the peak of The Mountain Goats' heyday, as this was flanked by albums such as "Sunset Tree" and "Get Lonely". This is sonically my favorite era, as John Darnielle was finding his footing, and making some sounds that I haven't seen many people replicate. The vocals are so on point; almost smooth and perfect with the characteristic serration of John's nasally delivery.
Ox Baker Triumphant
There is no better way to start an album than with the lyrics "I will rise from the swamp". This is a song about grit, about vengeance, and a perfect example of action-filled storytelling. The draw of John's writing is his unparalleled ability to weave between the realms of nuanced mundane descriptions ("worry lines on my forehead") and poetic magical realism ("practically walking on air"). The perspective is always shifting between what the characters are and what they imagine themselves to be. And there is a huge amount of storytelling you can do in the negative space between these worlds.
Rather annoyingly, the song "Ballad of Bull Ramos" released a decade later occupies the same mental space in my memory. My silly brain will think of Ballad when thinking of this song, even though they don't share much musically. Neurons that fire together, wire together, till death do them part.
I love how sweet the music is, and this sweet-music-overlaid-with-ferocious-lyrics strategy is used extensively in Beat The Champ (2015), which I consider to be the perfect (not necessarily my favorite) album where both the lyrics and music reached their all-career crescendo. It is wonderful to see the spark in this song that would bear the flame a decade later.
Some days I listen to songs as a thing to keep my senses occupied so that they don't create a stray thought that might lodge in my brain like a blood clot in a lung. Other days, I lean in close, and pay attention to the lyrics. I let the lyrics affect me, I let the words wash over me as if I hadn't listened to them a hundred times before. But every day I am a different person, and I listen with different ears. It is on one of these days that "Click your heels/ Count to three / I bet you never expected me" gives me goosebumps, and I think of the little worlds we create, and how we are nothing but a collection of stories.
Alibi
I will not question the multiple (yes, ) songs that John Darnielle has sang about infidelity as long as they are bangers. And oh boy, is Alibi a certified banger. This, to me, is quintessential mountain goats music where the strings and the keys all meld together into a symphony that serves not to smother the lyrics (as many pop songs do) but to make them float to the surface. I am reminded of this song whenever I travel anywhere and catch a little bit of breeze, or whenever I am heading a direction that I have been waiting all day (waiting all day) for.
There is a YouTube comment on this song that relates the lyrics "Like a patient on a table/ headed towards the light" to the T.S. Elliot starting line "When the evening is spread out against the sky/ Like a patient etherized upon a table". That comment is burned into my brain, and I will never not think about these two pieces of poetry separately.
The song feels deliberately ambiguous in its opening stanza. The character is just a person innocently transporting themselves across the city to see a loved one. All is good until the chorus hits, and it is revealed that the protagonist has an alibi -- gasp! The alibi, mind you, is even airtight.
Oh the love of detail that every mountain goats song is blessed with. In three quick lines that slide like casual brush strokes across a dirty canvas, the scene is painted. The song even has the time to shoehorn some unnecessary flavor ("Down by the chemistry building") which is my favorite part of listening to mountain goats songs. Each little piece in the diorama comes with a flavor text that situates the object not only within the world but also within ours. You know what a chemistry building looks and feels like. He uses this technique quite often by saying street names that have no descriptive, but infinite, storytelling value.
As our protagonist climbs up the stairs, he prepares himself to "jump on front of the train". But why would he need to do that? He is just going to meet a loved one, right? Wait, why are things bad? What's happening? This stanza ends with the wish that it would rain the next day. This guy has taken a long trip to meet this person, and maybe would like to watch the rain with them, all cozied up.
The melody is so good, that my bones always do a little dance whenever this song hits my eardrums. I have always felt icked by the line "Like a pair of identical twins" but I also think the nail is hit hard in the head with this analogy. When you meet that perfect person who completes your sentences, with whom your conversations move with smooth momentum, with whom every moment feels plucked from your dreams; you cannot help but wonder if the strings of fate had always tied you two together and that it is only now that the spool has pulled the threads back and landed you two together. Still, ugh.
It is at the tail-end of this song that we get to know that the person has a boyfriend who is out of town. In the songs "Adultery" and "How I left the Ministry" (sung by John and maybe some written by Franklin Bruno?), it is immediately made clear to the listener what the scene is -- these are two people, and they are cheating on their respective partners. Alibi, however, takes it sweet time. It presents itself as a love song that begins with yearning and follows the protagonist in his journey. Throughout this song, you feel the desire, and that makes you root for the young couple whose physical congregation feels like a speck of joy that rises like a spark from stones struck together. But then the secret is spilled and you are left with questions -- about them, and about yourself. How could you let partial information sway you? Can you trust anything anymore? You want to know if they are happy together and the boyfriend needs to be out of the picture. Is there some sneaky manipulation going on? God, can somethings not just be nice for once without being a messed-up mess of complications?
Sail Babylon Springs
I find it difficult to put my finger on what makes this song so beautiful. And I am concerned that if I do, this song so delicate might just pop, and reveal things I am not prepared to know. This is the most pain-filled song on the album (yes, in my opinion even more than the next song). This is the perfect moving song, for when you, you know, are moving houses. I don't necessarily think that's what they are doing in the song, but that is what I associate it with because that is when I listened to it a bunch.
The first metaphor in this song is direct. We are introduced to the two characters who seem to be doing their respective chores around the house, and we are hit in the face with "like deck chairs on the Titanic". Darnielle's metaphors are often quite obscure, but this one throws subtlety overboard to say "remember the Titanic? The primary metaphor of disaster? Yeah, what is happening here is as bad. Brace yourself." If some metaphors in John's writing are drawn from obscurity, the others are drawn from the bible. The biblical reference here being the river of Babylon, which I won't expound on.
The couple in this song is in a rough patch, and the protagonist's loved one upstairs is mad at him. Our protagonist has a trick up his sleeve, a tool to calm himself, the water from the river of Babylon itself. The protagonist has learned to tell himself that everything is okay in the face of the obvious disaster they are heading towards. "The stars have come out" and it seems that the two people haven't talked all day. The protagonist has no choice but to extend an offer of peace, and he asks the person to "jump if you want to jump" in his embrace. The protagonist has been swimming "blindly along/ the rivers of Babylon".
It is this harrowing acceptance of the whole situation that renders the scene in a piercingly painful light. I want to shake the narrator and ask him if he has achieved this state of Zen by rationally analyzing everything and doing the meticulous calculations, or by the sheer superpower of giving up. The person in the next song yearns for their loved one by talking about how they have been bruised. But at least, we know they can move forward and eventually find a way. But the narrator of this song is in an unenviable position. He is proud of how he has been swimming in the river the whole time, but we know what he doesn't -- he was taken by the waves long ago.
Sometimes I Still Feel the Bruise
It was years before I realized that this song was a cover of a Trembling Blue Stars song. I don't blame myself, because this song fits in the span of the The Mountain Goats lyric space. Figuring out what characteristics make a thing that thing is a ridiculously difficult problem mentally as well as technologically. I want to take a crack at characterizing what makes a song sound like a mountain goats song. This question is muddied by the fact that their sound changes every couple of years, but I think the core still remains. So, let's see if I can find the core.
- The lyrics are the focus of a mountain goats song. You listen to the song because there is a story being told, a scene being set, and in some cases, a joke being cracked to its logical extreme. No matter how large and rich the musical landscape of TMG's songs becomes with horns, synths, and strings, the stand-out geographical feature is definitely the mountain of lyrics. This song is all about its lyrics, like a chandelier lit up by sadness.
- The metaphors are intertwined with mundane settings and observations. A hard-hitting poetic line will come right after the most normal thing you could have a person say. This song rhymes "why would you think of me" with "when you were not the dreamer/ you were just a dream", and you can't help but stow away this in the recesses of your brainfolds in case it comes in handy someday.
This song is close to my heart because I found my teenage fit snugly fitting the shoes of the narrator. I realized how painful it was to dream, how the bruise will stay, and how it sucked that "the way we left it was that you'd ring". The silence grew longer, spanning a long century of seven years, and I was extremely "surprised" when the person "showed up". We exchanged a few emails after that, and we are now in regular contact. It is extremely hard and personal to describe, and so this vague sliver of my life is all that you get.
The drums in the beginning of this song are so good, I could listen to them on loop. "I am under no illusion/ as to what I meant to you/ But you made an impression/ and sometimes I still feel the bruise". Only sometimes, I like that the healing is underway.
Wait for you
The last song in this EP holds no special place in my heart or bones or brain. It is, however, lovely. It is also 3:14 in length, which is always cute.
This is one of the few songs (any, honestly) that paints a rainbow in a rather nefarious light. I like snakes, but the protagonist imagines the rainbow as a serpent coiling itself around the Earth. It suffocates him. This is a bad day for the protagonist and all signs of joy are making it worse. And I get it. Some days you just want to be left alone with your sadness and feel its whole weight. This could be the same protagonist as the previous song but from an earlier time, right after they had been abandoned. This is a time when maybe they hold the hope that the person will come back. Years before acceptance, teetering on the edge of denial.
The rainbow is in the west, and so the sun is rising. "But I knew this was not the day" tells us that the person is giving up early. "Nothing anyone could do, I suppose" is one heart-wrenching way to end an album. I often like slow, quiet mountain goats songs, but this one just does not do it for me.
Epilogue: one universe?
Are all of the songs following the same narrator? Maybe our story starts with Alibi, where a young couple in love has to hide their relationship from the world. They are passionate, and possibly making mistakes, and the embers of this passion eventually give way to the ashes of complications that litter the soil of every relationship. We find ourselves in Sail Babylon Springs. The narrator has grown accustomed to this style of secretive life, and takes their partner's emotion in stride. We know this about our narrator; he eventually, through trials and disaster, finds acceptance. His partner is clearly mad at him about something. I think this issue balloons and they break contact, and the narrator finds himself ghosted by this person. This is where Wait for You comes in, as the narrator wanders the streets in the hope that they will get to see and talk to them again. Joy is painful, and any second he will find himself tumbling through the stages of grief. We skip these stages and find ourselves in the future (near? far?) where the narrator has once again found himself washed upon the shore of acceptance. Sometimes I Feel the Bruise is about dealing with the remnants of yearning, stuck like leeches on his body. Making contact was hard but eventually contact is made, but the then-boyfriend-now-husband gets a whiff of what's happening, and enacts violence upon our narrator. The narrator wakes up and finds himself in a swamp. He is bruised, he has no intent to wait, and he does not care for an alibi for the deed he is about to do. He is ready to set sail, extract his vengeance, and he shall as Ox Baker, be Triumphant.