The Mountain Goats
Tallahassee
4AD

Rock may be the music of the American heartland, but folk is the music about that heartland. Rock is perfect for communicating emotion, but the lyrics are often lost to the licks, and the message is subsumed by the genre's raw anger and lust. Folk, on the other hand, is a delicate balance of words and sounds, the instruments — acoustic guitars, banjos, fiddles — providing the sonic backdrop to vocals sweet and clear, telling the stories of success and loss.

Folk, like rock, is also a loose enough genre to include all sorts of stylistic side notes and segues. That's because at its heart, the form is less about the music than the images, ideas and stories it communicates. Which is why folk is much more given to conceptualism than rock — the idea of a musical career as a project, with characters and locations and sentiments spanning not just songs but entire albums, is something many times more prevalent in folk than rock.

John Darnielle, who records as the Mountain Goats, is all about projects. A prolific artist, Tallahassee is his third release this year (following All Hail West Texas, which came out in February, and an album by The Extra Glenns, a side project). These complement dozens of albums, seven-inches, cassettes, contributions to compilations and works by four side efforts; Darnielle also writes music criticism for a number of online and print publications. His songs range from the vague and impressionistic to the narrative and concrete, but, at least lately, he has been obsessed with a very specific set of themes: the American landscape and the love that rises and falls across it. On both All Hail and Tallahassee, lovers ride off into the sunset, settle down in small towns and roam across the country in search of some lost spark.

Many of Darnielle's songs, in fact, encircle a very specific couple, whom fans have dubbed the "Alphas" — they're never identified, but the titles all include the word "alpha" (Tallahassee ends with "Alpha Rats Nest"); those songs all revolve around a couple in slow decline, ergo. If you think this reeks of overdoing what are, ultimately, just love songs, you're not necessarily wrong — but Darnielle's songs beg for this sort of contemplation. They contain worlds. When "First Few Desperate Hours" begins with the lines "Bad luck comes in from Tampa/ Bad luck comes in from Tampa/ On the back of a truck/ Doing 90 up the interstate," you expect it to be a portrait of an itinerant loser, a page ripped from the Jim Croce songbook. But soon it explodes, each stanza about a different character, waiting. The song is full of nervous energy; by the end all Darnielle's concrete nouns and sticky verbs have added up to a psychological sketch of a community on the cusp of something apocalyptic. "When cloven hoof prints turn up in the garden/ we keep up the good fight" — lines you can chew on for hours.

All Hail West Texas and many of Darnielle's other efforts are notable for their extremely lo-fi approach — just him, a guitar, maybe a cheap drum machine, all recorded on a Panasonic boom box or a four-track. It's a great, singular sound, but one that narrows the musical range — there's only so much acoustic aggressiveness you can put a low-end recording system through before it craps out. Tallahassee, on the other hand, was recorded in a traditional studio, and with a broad musical palette — backup singers, electric guitars, and soaring vocals from Darnielle. He rocks out something fierce on "See America Right," a beat-heavy paean to love and drinking, and it startles you to hear such sounds coming from a guy whose voice is normally so very nasal.

Tallahassee is also a more abstract effort than the narrative-heavy All Hail West Texas; whereas that album was about place, Tallahassee is about emotion — angst, love, all the typical stock of popular music, but here inverted and recombined. Nothing in Darnielle's music can be taken literally, and yet it is all so very literal and concrete. Irony drips everywhere, but Darnielle never winks. The anti-love song "No Children" — whose upper-range male harmonizing makes it sound like Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young singing Warren Zevon — uses burning junkyards and shaving accidents to lead to the chorus "In my life/ I hope I lie/ And tell everyone you were a good wife;/ I hope you die/ I hope we both die." And yet the acoustic guitar is so sweet and mellow that Darnielle can't possibly be serious. But you're never sure.

Underlying all Darnielle's songs is an undeniable sense of America. A country of truck stops and back yards and burning things, of minimum-wage jobs and long stretches of empty highway. This has all been done before; it's the heart of the folk tradition. But Darnielle's lyrics — a mix of They Might Be Giants, Bob Dylan and Weird Al Yankovic — dramatically reinterpret that well-traversed text that is Americana. In interviews, Darnielle likes to talk about his passion for death metal, and it's not surprising — while many of his songs are the furthest from the likes of Manowar, Darnielle is also into shock. But where Gwar uses obscenity and loud music, Darnielle uses witty juxtaposition and off-the-gourd humor to wake up his listeners; what else to make of "International Small Arms Traffic Blues," and its line "our love is like the border between Greece and Albania?" Darnielle wants you to think — think about America, about the lonely highways and rundown, outlying suburbs that make up a surprisingly large portion of our national psyche, and about the low-rent knights errant and go-nowhere garage bands who populate it.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)