Review Summary: A man saying "no homo" for approximately an hour and fifteen minutes
I can’t stop thinking about that one scene in “The 40 Year Old Virgin” with the poker table whenever I think of this album. “Oh, yeah, man, I love being a heterosexual man, and I love heterosexual women! Especially when they, uh…”, Will repeats in the exact cadence of Steve Carrell, “...bake bread?”.
Will Wood’s last record, The Normal Album, contained a track called “I/Me/Myself”. The song was about Will’s relation to his gender identity as a synecdoche for he feels about his relation to the concept of identity in general. The entire album was all about different ways people compartmentalize and pathologize different parts of themselves, leading to a toxic relationship with the entire concept of an “identity”. It was a fun little track, fit well with the themes of the album, and Will seems to have hated it ever since it was released. The Genius Page for the track includes the text from a lengthy, lyric by lyric breakdown of the track Will released on his blog. There, Will has gone to excruciating, painful lengths to assure anyone who will listen that, while he used to identify as genderqueer, he no longer does, Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That!
As fate would have it, that song that Will seems to hate blew up as a sort of trans anthem on some clock app the kids like. It’s now his most popular track, by a lot. Judging by the lyrical contents of this album, he doesn’t seem to have taken that well. I’m not bringing all of this up to try to claim Will is secretly some sort of queer, or secretly some sort of homophobe or transphobe. What I’m saying is that his new music sounds insecure, above anything else. This new album’s lyric content is a good 60% bet-hedging. Songs are utterly saturated with “Don’t take this as”s’, and “That’s not to say”’s’.
This is especially apparent in the first 40 or so minutes of the record, which is largely unlistenable. This record has me convinced that someone who’s close to Will Wood, and really loves him, should do him a massive favor and break every single acoustic guitar he owns. We’d all be better for it. The one good track amongst the first 9 is “Euthanasia”. On a better album, this would have been the last track. A nice capstone to contrast the final track of The Normal Album, which it seems to have been written as an internal response too. Currently it sits in the album as just another quiet song in a sea of them. A nice little lullaby that feels like the only tune on this album designed to put someone to sleep on purpose. As opposed to the rest, which do it by accident.
The most endemic song of this album’s failures has to be “Becoming the Lastnames”. There’s a nice little 2 minute song about the beauty of a life of boring domesticity with someone you love. It’s buried in a saw trap for the other 6 minutes of this track. I seriously can’t get over the run time of this track. An 8 minute long lyrically driven song backed by minimal strings with maybe a verse and a half of words worth singing.
This album also serves as a “getting sober” record for Will, and has also convinced me that any artist in the future attempting a “getting sober” record should be banned from the “Adult Contemporary” genre entirely. If we find out in the future that Sufjan Stevens was addicted to some new age drug like kratom this entire time, well then I’m sorry but the next album has to be psychedelic death metal or something. Sorry Sufjan, Will ruined it for everyone. Look at Trent Reznor’s “get-sober” album. That guy didn’t come out of rehab and release a record that sounded like a new Mountain Goats release, only without the emotionally charged earnest lyricism. He made “With Teeth”, an album that includes the lyric “*** in the fire and we’ll spread all the ashes around”. That line is, maybe, a bit try-hard. A bit cringey. A tad off-putting. It isn’t, however, boring.
If you tell me, in your lyrics, that you’re a changed man and you didn’t need drugs to make interesting music, then you should really try hard to make sure that the new album isn’t incredibly boring. It’s not that I think Will needs drugs, or androgyny, or hypergamy, or atheism, or any of the trappings of a flippant artistic vagabond lifestyle that Will swears off in this record. It’s that Will’s music, in everything including its insecure lyrics, communicates to the listener that he, himself, doesn't think he can make interesting music. On account of the fact that, this music isn’t interesting. You can, in fact, make songs about how traditional Christianity is cool and have them sound cool. There’s this one song I like, about that very concept. It had interesting arrangements, and atmosphere, and heart, and I believed that the singer believed what he was saying. It’s called “The Song with Five Names” by this band called “Will Wood and the Tapeworms”. Hey, wait a minute.
There are interesting ideas in the back half of this album, by the way. But they mostly serve to insult the listener, hinting at a more interesting album that we could have had instead. “The Main Character” serves as a return to form, a song that purposefully sounds like something the old Will Wood would have written. It comes sandwiched between, like, 4 other tracks talking about how that old Will Wood guy sucked and was terrible. See what I mean, about the insecurity?
There’s also hints about a better concept album in “You Liked This (Okay, Computer)” and lyrics about surveillance in “Um, I mean, it’s Kind of a Lot”. There’s hints of a different album, about technology and algorithm-defined identities that would have worked very well off the back of The Normal Album. Here, it just feels out of place. You have one experimental interlude that feels so underdeveloped here that it would have felt better alongside the last album.
With every new Mountain Goats release, John Darnielle makes his music sound a bit quieter. There’s a few more coffee shop slam poetry bongo drums present in each release. Each record sounds more and more like something you’d hear muffled through the bathroom door as you’re pooping at a Panera Bread. More adult contemporary, less boombox-recorded folk. And it works, because I believe John when he sings. I don’t believe Will. That’s the main issue with this record. If the old Will Wood wasn’t who he truly was, then at least his lies were interesting. This new Will Wood sounds boring, and I don’t believe he sounds particularly earnest, either. So if you’re not going to confidently speak your truth, or even tell me interesting lies, then what use do I have for you?
