Let's start with an exemplary case - and one of my persistent favourites. 'Absolute Lithops Effect' is a modest and unassuming little song that pops up as the last track of an album rich in highlights. It has a simple core idea which is broached and developed in the most straightforward ways over just a couple of minutes and - like almost all the early Mountain Goats' recordings - could barely have been more crudely laid down for posterity: simple guitar and voice committed to tape on a boombox whose ailing machinery can clearly be heard throughout. Things have got much more sophisticated and ambitious of late, but for many this is still the band's true sound. That is, the sound of no band at all.
The song's structure is also characteristically plain. These days, JD is capable of a masterful middle eight, but he doesn't want shade or variety here. A shift of tone or perspective would detract from the tightly focused mood he is after, so we simply get verse/chorus/verse/chorus - a rudimentary pattern that holds for many of his other songs too. This makes it an easy enough one to play, though there are in fact a few more than 'the same four chords I use most of the time when I've got something on my mind' ('You Were Cool'). The verses hinge on a slightly awkward (for my clumsy fingers) Dmaj7 and the descending bass part in the chorus is a nice, enlivening touch.
As for the words, this is a song about an extended period of suffering and listless inactivity coming to an end in anticipated rebirth. JD finds the ideal image for this in the lithops, a succulent plant which looks like a small pebble in its dormant state but flowers dramatically when exposed to the mixture of heat, light and water sung about in the chorus (I've got one on my windowsill, but it has yet to flower). The botanical metaphor ('I will bloom/here in my room') is one JD likes and uses elsewhere to evoke recovery (see also 'Island Garden Song') but it is not forced, partly because the lithops is only explicitly mentioned in the title and partly because of key details that exist apart from it: plants don't have jaws or friends, they may need light and water but there is no obvious sense in which they require 'tender mercy'. As so often in a Mountain Goats song, it is we humans who need that, and only we humans who can supply it for each other.
Why do I like this song so much? What makes it such a good example of at least some of what JD does well? These are questions I want to take my time over, but the humble proportions are certainly part of the appeal. Like Emily Dickinson sitting down to write about one of her favourite subjects (love, death, the nature of the afterlife...) Darnielle knows he will be back at work again tomorrow and so doesn't feel the need to say everything he has to say, to be expansive or in any sense definitive. And yet simplicity and directness do not lead to naivety. 'Absolute Lithops Effect' is an essentially hopeful song, yes, but not a thoughtlessly cheerful one. Any hope is earned and remains provisional. On this evidence, JD believes in our capacity to survive and prosper, but knows too that coming back to life makes us vulnerable and causes pain ('my insides are pink and raw/and it hurts me when I move my jaw'). He celebrates the flowering potential of the lithops, but he also understands why it has to play dead sometimes.
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