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Get Lonely

by The Mountain Goats

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On the Mountain Goats' previous albums, songwriter John Darnielle bluntly sang about broken marriages and broken souls. With 2005's The Sunset Tree, meanwhile, he took on his abusive stepfather using surprising vitriol for a squeaky voiced indie rocker armed with just an acoustic guitar. On Get Lonely, Darnielle seems to have found a certain sense of peace, settling into a series of supple songs that evoke sad-eyed folkies such as Belle & Sebastian ("Half Dead") and Cat Stevens ("Maybe Sprout Wings"). But through the dark clouds, he also exhibits a sly sense of humor, particularly singing to a departed lover in "Woke Up New." It's hard to think of anything funnier or more depressing than the lines, "The first time I made coffee for just myself/ I made too much of it/ But I drank it all/ Just cause you hate it when I let things go to waste." --Aidin Vaziri