album review: 'bleed out' by the mountain goats

Let’s talk about dad rock.

I think at this point the term is generally accepted with a shrug and a general understanding of what it means - generally white, middlebrow adult alternative and indie rock spanning the mid-90s to, well, now, with a bit of a domestic, nostalgic feel but also capable to kicking a little ass if need be. Originally it was coined as an insult in the 90s and 2000s - often thrown at Wilco or The National - but eventually folks wound up embracing those bands and that sound and while the term would never be cool, it was generally accepted. The interesting thing is that while the writer who popularized the term might have intended it as a pejorative in the 2000s, now being older he’s embraced it, as have a lot of the bearded indie rock and indie critic set that have seen their tastes become passe as time marches on; it’s why dad rock doesn’t have to be cool, it’s just a state of mind where you’re old enough to not care about being cool.

That said, given my own roots in country music, I have messier opinions around ‘dad rock’ in general - yeah, winsome sincere nostalgia can be emotionally satisfying, but those rose-tinted glasses can obscure some underlying structural issues and complacency that dad rock and its friendly critics don’t want to acknowledge - hell, the natural extension of this can be Music Row and Nashville, which is a much uglier rabbit hole. Yeah, it has its resonance, but what really underscores that comfort, what is allowed to be ignored, and why are we so comfortable letting acts rest on their laurels to pump out the same material over and over again in this genre; it’s the reason I’ve never reviewed a Wilco album, there’s no goddamn point! And all of this obscures how like with other subgenres there’s a scale of quality within dad rock that tends to brushed aside - even if it hurts to prod at that nostalgia, I’ve seen a lot of crap get a pass for precisely that reason, because why make a fuss, and it says something that a lot of white guys don’t want to do the work to interrogate the art that underscores our own nostalgia.

Enter John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats, who prior to this album I would never slot into the ‘dad rock’ paradigm - his interests were too niche, his songwriting quirks too weird, and his sonic palette twisting to so many nooks and crannies. But he’s also in his mid-50s and he’s a dad, and when I started hearing buzz that the Mountain Goats’ newest album was their ‘dad rock’ album, based on the sort of over-the-top action films you’d see from the mid-80s to, well, now, I wasn’t sure what to expect, mostly because Darnielle tends to take a bit of a subversive or challenging take on subgenres which seems like the last thing you’d expect from dad rock. But hey, after a few pretty understated albums I was up for the Mountain Goats to kick a little more ass, so what did we get from Bleed Out?

…so at some point I may have said last week on social media that this is the Mountain Goats’ best album since Goths and easily one of the best albums of 2022, and while I didn’t get any backlash from this - most fans have been onboard with this one - I’m a little surprised it hasn’t received a greater influx of acclaim or attention, given that on some level, this is also John Darnielle’s most straightforward and accessible album in years, certainly the hardest the band has rocked since the early 2010s. Granted, I wouldn’t have opened this review with a detailed discussion of ‘dad rock’ if it wasn’t going to play into some layered and complicated themes within seemingly simple compositions here; the devil is absolutely in the details with this one, and while you can absolutely appreciate this as a straightforward, comfortable alt-rock album, dig a little deeper and you’ll find one of the most fascinating and layered explorations of masculinity I’ve heard in a long time.

And part of that is pretty obvious right on the face: John Darnielle has a unique, nasal tone in his voice and no matter how much he ramps up to belt, he doesn’t have the stereotypical voice that you’d have heard in adult alternative and dad rock. It’s not gruff or deep or traditionally powerful in a rock or metal timbre, and when juxtaposed against the jangling guitars, more sinuous grooves, and even the influx of horns, it brings a different energy to a series of songs about action movies. It’s not explicitly subversive or parodic - ‘Training Montage’ proves Darnielle can still kick ass if he wants to - but it immediately highlights someone who would be the everyman in the action movie rather than the stereotypical hero character, the same principle that came with initially casting Bruce Willis in Die Hard. But the language and style of poetry on this album might as well have come from an action movie - it’s more blunt and declarative, the sort of lines you’d expect from the Stallones and Schwarzeneggers and Van Dammes of the world, especially as it’s predominantly first person. More importantly, it’s not ironic or being played for an obvious joke - like with Goths this is an album that recognizes the emotive power that can come from living in this scene while also being smart enough with framing to capture more angles within it.

And that’s where Bleed Out really starts to come into its own, and let’s talk about action movies for a bit here. I recently rewatched Predator with my best friend and while that movie is a lot of fun, I don’t think it would have the pure staying power it does if it was all just cheesy action and one-liners; they have to make sense within the context of the universe, often a hypermasculine, swaggering, guys-on-a-mission vibe riding on dark humour and raw charisma, an emotive appeal rather than pure logic. But let’s be real, even the modern, Christopher Nolan-esque action thrillers that have their own corny one-liners operate on a similar principle, that run on an appeal to calculated reason where even if you dig a little deeper it’s pure nonsense. But hey, films and art have to be stronger than logic, and Bleed Out gets that there’s a gut level appeal to those masculine-coded sentiments, and from training montages to street level standoffs to the preparation montage to going out in a blaze of glory, it’s going to capture those escapist fantasies for dads who grew up on it all. But Darnielle also knows that taking those scenes outside of the context of the films can reveal a little more - outside of the fantasy they can come across as posturing at best and borderline grotesque at worst, rife with reckless paranoia, rage, and machismo that so many want to embrace directly.

And this is where I think the production choices are kind of inspired on this album, because similar to how Goths took its pulse-bounding tapestries of darkness and coaxed it through a more ‘normal’ tableau of jazz-inflected soft rock, how many goths actually led their lives, Bleed Out takes subject matter that might be better equipped for thrash metal or hard rock and gives it a dad rock palette - it’s warm, it’s often major key, it evokes memories of The A-Team or action comedies or cop shows. And that’s a compliment - this album is stacked with great hooks and anthemic moments that are easy to cheer for, highlighting just how much of this is pure entertainment, but also is accessible to a wider audience - and then when you add those lyrics, it creates enough tension for you to start questioning whether cheering along is right. Now a lot of folks will just keep charging forward and fair enough - despite this album’s body count it still needs to be entertaining to make its point, even with its sacrificial closing title track, and that’s where the comforting embrace of dad rock is in full swing - but there’s enough moments that are just dark enough that make you realize this isn’t just lionizing those movies. I might think ‘Wage Wars Get Rich Die Handsome’ has a killer bass gallop, but that hook might as well have been imported from the subtext of any Reagan-era action movie, or the gleaming flutter of guitars on ‘Make You Suffer’ that can’t get past the downright sinister sentiment of its title line! Or take the smoky rollick of ‘Hostages’, where the song just jams the hell out for its final few minutes, but the underlying sentiment is that when a villain has nothing left to lose, he’s just going to start killing people; he might run out of bullets, but not hostages! But on the flipside you get the horn-inflected swell of ‘Extraction Point’ where you get the commando prepping for the mission, a theme later echoed in the aged fighter on ‘Bones Don’t Rust’, or how ‘Training Montage’ feels so damn anthemic, or the jaunty acoustic exasperation of ‘Incandescent Ruins’ where from a sci-fi scene a soldier is pinned down and can’t escape and you wind up rooting for him; similar to the desperate medic on ‘Need More Bandages’ with the panicked, borderline post-punk guitar line and eerie keys. This is where I have to give a ton of credit to producer Alicia Bognanno, who did a lot to not just flesh out the underlying grooves and percussion on this album but also give it a loose verve that really translates effectively and keeps the sound from becoming interchangeable track to track; it might be comfortable, but there’s diversity here.

And I think that’s at the core of this album: for as much as this album will showcase both sides of masculine art and archetypes, I would not call it an outright critique so much as a full contextualization. The methods of preparation and routine on extraction point are familiar and comfortable, but you don’t get a pension for being that lone killer for hire. ‘Guys On Every Corner’ is a great picture of the rugged hero with all of his contacts against the system out to get him, but it could just as easily be paranoid rambling, Even ‘Training Montage’ roots its main line on the hook in ‘doing this for revenge’, but there’s always been an emptiness to vengeance once achieved - directly referenced on ‘Mark On You’ - and while it works in the driving context of the moment, when you pull it ever so slightly outside that fantasy, there’s a different angle to it. You get a lot of hyper-individualized scenes and heroes, where even if you’re pulling a team together it’s every man proving their own worth, and for what? The title track in particular highlights just how pointless this violence is - the heroes become mass casualties, the blood will wash away and be forgotten, there’s no words of wisdom, the blur of friends and enemies stops mattering, you just die. But the kids need a hero with a happy ending so you skip past the grisly finale, and the rest of the audience will lap up the sacrifice, and despite the grimmest of endings there was value in the story being told… the problem becomes when you try to translate the emotional reality of the fantasy to the actual reality in which we live. I’d say the closer parallel is Alan Moore’s Watchmen and its searing commentary on how superheroes being real would only let us down, but Bleed Out is more empathetic in our desire for heroes and those masculine archetypes, there’s an emotional truth that’s closer to the end of Don Quixote. But I think the deeper note comes in how we perceive art in this lane and should keep it in its lane, and that’s amplified through that dad rock niche - it might be comfortable and would prefer to gloss over the violence that comes in a hyper-literal translation if it moves beyond entertainment, but to paraphrase Darnielle himself talking about making the title track, there’s a communal experience in the individualized moment where it all pours out, and nothing else matters but seeing it through.

And it’s funny, John Darnielle has mentioned in interviews that a lot of artists like to circle back to the process of writing about writing, metatext that becomes text - and I’ll freely admit I’m a sucker for it as a writer myself. And part of the glory of fiction is that imagination is an infinite resource - it can be stronger than logic and still have that deep-seated emotive pull, for as much as men want to ground everything in logic and a ruthlessly defined plan, if it’s awesome enough we stop caring! But that doesn’t map clearly to a finite reality, and it’s that metamodernist tension that gives Bleed Out so much resonance for me - it can be anthemic and deconstructive simultaneously and still feel powerful because we can grasp the reality and long for the excess all amidst the comfort of a tone that we know…. although maybe it’s not a great thing that we get too comfortable! Of course, if you want to just take in the ride, the hooks are terrific, the jams are amazingly atmospheric and tuneful, the mix is impeccably balanced, the grooves are phenomenal, and it’ll still tug your heartstrings; for an album to work on so many levels, it has to be doing something right. As for where it falls in the pantheon of Mountain Goats albums… John Darnielle is over two dozen albums with multiple classics, and this could well be one. I wouldn’t call this a jump-on point when the 2000s run still exists, but if you’re looking for a smart kickass singer-songwriter dad rock record, this is it; it goes down swinging, and it’s worth it.