When one of the remaining members of the crew\u2014Adam, his name a wicked twist on biblical allusion\u2014walks into the sea and drowns himself on \u201cRocks in my Pocket,\u201d the pathos is wrenching: \u201cSome people name their cars or their guitars,\u201d he comments on the eponymous stones, \u201cSome things are too fragile to name.\u201d Ditto when the album\u2019s unnamed, 16-year-old protagonist asks Peter Balkan, \u201cWill you lie still while I reapply your bandage?\u201d Darnielle shows the thinness of the line between rite of passage and funeral rite. We\u2019re made to think of how global warming-related disasters instantaneously transform hum-drum lives into mortal battles with nature. \u201cIt\u2019s time for you to go\/But you never lost your glow,\u201d Darnielle laments in the stirring \u201cYour Glow,\u201d which he expands to encompass the whole globe: \u201cIf there\u2019s nothing left but water\/Then let water be enough.\u201d The human spirit preserves, just as the world will keep turning in the absence of people.<\/p>\n
This conceit is weighty, sometimes profound, and also pat for a songwriter who has created towering dramas with more quotidian stakes \u2014the aging of the counterculture, which he depicted with exceptional poignance on 2015\u2019s Goths<\/a>, or the horror of living with an abusive stepfather, a theme that courses through 2005\u2019s classic The Sunset Tree<\/a>. These works are sinuous, robust and thick with implication, while Through This Fire proceeds with event after event, and even as Darnielle\u2019s words cut to the quick, we feel as if his songcraft glides across the surface. Take closer \u201cBroken to Begin With,\u201d with its swelling guitar solo that echoes his friends in the Hold Steady<\/a>. Presumably in the waning minutes of his existence on earth, the adolescent speaker pictures his campsite discovered in years to come by \u201cMen of old who sailed the seas.\u201d The notion of a civilization destroying itself to rise again in a pre-industrial mode is crushingly resonant, but its exploration of the mysteries of existence feels too predetermined. An abrupt restatement of the chorus of \u201cCold At Night\u201d finishes the LP and only contributes to its overall air of slightness. Through This Fire seems confused about whether it wants to reach for miniaturist genius or ambitious sweep\u2014the Mountain Goats managed to achieve both in the past.<\/p>\n On occasion, Darnielle allows us to reach for our own connections, rather than setting them in our hands, wrapped in wisdom and a perfect sense of meter. \u201cEverything that sinks will float,\u201d he repeats in his relentless sing-song on \u201cThe Lady From Shanghai 2.\u201d This statement envisions a poetic fate for the corpses of lost sailors, but it also resuscitates a memorable tidbit for fans: on the band\u2019s last record, 2023\u2019s Jenny From Thebes<\/a>, the titular character, a woman devoted to protecting the threatened outcasts of West Texas, murders a ne\u2019er-do-well landlord, stores his body in a water tower, and then sets him free, to \u201cfloat downstream.\u201d Death may be inevitable, but Darnielle casts out lifelines in his work, rescuing old motifs in order to refuse simple interpretations, tidy conclusions, and despair. And so his practice feels bottomless, while Through This Fire pushes ever forward as if its author had a destination in mind when he began the journey of writing. Such unswerving momentum is a mistake for which his immense skill can only partially compensate. The ocean, after all, is not just wide, it\u2019s deep.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When one of the remaining members of the crew\u2014Adam, his name a wicked twist on biblical allusion\u2014walks into…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":300574,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[776,88,216,777],"class_list":{"0":"post-300573","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-albums","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-music","11":"tag-web"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=300573"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300573\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/300574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}