Review Summary: all the tired horses in the sun / how'm I s'posed to get any riding done?
Joseph D'Agostino's songs play like smoke travels upwards in the wind: his blackly comic tales of the heartbreak and despair that lurks on the edge of America(na) steadfastly refuse to travel along straight lines. He winds in and out of character voices like a seasoned poet, spiraling through vortices where blue-eyed serial killers and precognitive Virginia teens rub shoulders with stories so raw they could only be ripped from real life. Somewhere inbetween David Berman's wicked wit, the unhinged falsetto yowls of Modest Mouse's Isaac Brock and a sensibility for hooks which suggests years of power pop and indie absorbed via osmosis, D'Agostino somehow remains a singular voice in the scene, a deeply human songwriter whose razor-sharp character portraits would feel equally at home in a short story anthology as in his consistent stream of superb music under any given name.
On
Empty Country II, D'Agostino has finally written something like a show bible, one which pulls together all the strands and signifiers of his various eras. It's an undertaking extensive enough that the album comes with an hourlong accompanying narration, "Basilisk", delivered in a truly unsettling pitch shifted mumble like David Bowie's "Baby Grace (A Horrid Cassette)". In fact, replace the industrial trappings of
Outside with an art-damaged alt-country aesthetic, like some lost curio you might dig up in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre horrorhouse or the Twin Peaks guitar shop Pearl describes in "Basilisk", and you might start to get at how
Empty Country II sounds. The nine-song tracklist and return of John Agnello on production bring to mind Cymbals Eat Guitars' high watermark
LOSE, but there's a rawer edge and predilection towards sprawl here that recalls
Why There Are Mountains. Songs unravel and decay over the course of several minutes, shifting through time signatures like old gears, a heavenly chorus emerging through the chaos and then just as quickly subsiding again - safe to say, not the most immediate or comfortable of listens.
It's that very inaccessibility which marks this sophomore release as something more than just Part 2 to the humbly released but wonderful
Empty Country debut. There are as many differences between the two as similarities: for every direct line, like "Pearl" being the daughter of the 'blue baby' named in "Marian" or "Bootsie" springing wholesale from one line in the same song, there's a sharp divergence point like the Berman tribute "David". The song struggles with the weight of acting as a eulogy for one of the greatest writers of his age while offering thoughtful reflection on the act of songwriting itself, D'Agostino pondering the creation of his 'psychedelic soap operas' while calling back to Berman's phenomenal 'Self-Portrait at 28'. You have "Dustine", which I'm pretty sure takes time out of deep existential musings to reference fuckin' Hellraiser, back-to-back with the Trail of Dead-esque punk ripper "Syd", and a distorted harmonica breakdown on the otherwise Elliott Smith-esque "FLA" which sounds like absolutely nothing I've ever heard before. "Bootsie" reveals the plague that takes Marian's "pretty friends" as the AIDS epidemic, burning through 80s New York and devastating a queer community, giving way to a chorus which flips Talking Heads' "Heaven" on its head for the album's most unexpectedly euphoric moment. Both albums end from the perspective of a convicted killer, but the labyrinthine "Cool S" is worlds apart from the plaintive beauty of "Swim", this closer a downright disturbing peek into psychosis that ends with a line that somehow perfectly sums up both the murder and the entire opioid-ravaged wasteland the album illustrates: "I guess it was just one of those things".
Yet the biggest difference between the two may be the clear change in authorial voice. The largely male protagonists of the debut have been supplanted by voices even more marginalised than the desperate, lonely characters of
Empty Country. This was a change hinted at on the between-albums trans anthem "Andi", which presumably was something of a genesis point for
Empty Country II given its appearance towards the end of "Basilisk", here fully realised. From Marian at 13 to her daughter Pearl at 17, both damaged by their inherited visions but finding community in queer love, the album wanders to Pearl's ex-girlfriend Syd, and even a potential future descendant in "Lamb", shredding her dirtbike through a post-apocalyptic 2039 like some cyberpunk Bob Dylan (
how'm I s'posed to get any riding done?). It's there down to the song titles, almost all of which are names and nicknames of people, a far cry from the place names which dominated the titles in Cymbals Eat Guitars. And where that project became more stripped-down and glossier with every release, Empty Country is seemingly on the reverse course of that arc - it's like their debut was the explosion and
II is the aftermath, a fucked-up star going supernova.
When I reviewed
Empty Country, I was effusive in my praise for D'Agostino's new project and rightfully gushing over its crown jewel "Marian", but I had no clue just how important the album would become to me in the years since. It feels like life just split in half sometime around 2020, because of the pandemic or adulthood really getting its claws in or a million other stupid reasons, and in that terrifying yawning gulf between the two, one of the few pieces of driftwood I had to cling to was that strangely moving album. Maybe things are clearer, if no less terrifying on the other side, but it still feels to me like we're all telling stories in the dark, hoping the words will keep us warm. If that's the case, I've got nine more to tell you, and they're all burning hotter than the goddamn sun.
