Tallahassee

MINUTES FROM THE 2002 ANNUAL MEETING OF THE CONCEPT ALBUM SOCIETY

As I'm sure you are all aware, 2002 has been a fantastic year for the concept album, quite possibly one of the best since our heyday at the turn of the 1970s. While major-label artists resisted the rock opera urge (which is perhaps for the best; let us not forget MACHINA and Chris Gaines), acts below the mainstream radar took up the slack nicely. John Vanderslice, Black Heart Procession, Pedro the Lion... hip-hop even gave us a concept record that, shockingly, was not a science fiction gimmick: Mr. Lif's I Phantom.

Soon, we'll be voting on final nominees for our honorary Pete Townshend Concept Album of the Year award. But before you cast your ballot, some members have requested that we address a late entry to this year's competition: The Mountain Goats' Tallahassee. Since his full-length cassette debut in 1991, John Darnielle has threaded the sagas of flawed relationships through his albums, generally told in one-song installments. Now, for the first time in 81 albums (okay, 16... or something, it's confusing), Darnielle has expanded these tragic stories into an entire LP, set in the diamond city of Florida's panhandle.

The idea is enticing: Darnielle, known for crafting two-minute biographies like "Fall of the Star High School Running Back" richer in detail than a 700-page novel, is given greater room to flesh out his stories. His talent for depicting the rises and falls of a relationship in singular, tiny details (fighting over the car radio, for example) makes him ideal for the task of an indie-folk Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.

The result is the pleasant musical equivalent of a slow, deliberate character study, rich with symbols like circling crows and a house in disrepair, more concerned with in-depth observation of the protagonists than with narrative movement. Unfortunately, this pace makes for a less than successful concept album, with song topics tracing an endless I Love You/I Love You Not oscillation, from the cautious happiness of the title track and "Game Shows Touch Our Lives" to the for-the-throat attacks of "No Children" or "Have to Explode".

The music is distracted by another concept, as well-- a meta-concept, if you will, with Tallahassee touted as the first Mountain Goats release to be recorded with a full, traditionally-instrumented rock band. Darnielle spends most of the album teasing the listener with this promise, adding a bass here, some minimal drums there, perhaps a harmonica, before (gotcha!) we arrive back at a Darnielle solo arrangement. When we finally come to a song with an actual, honest-to-God rhythm section ("See America Right") it sounds disappointingly like... Cake?!

The majority of Tallahassee, recorded with Darnielle's Extra Glenns cohort Franklin Bruno, is, like the Extra Glenns' Martial Arts Weekend, typically stripped-down Goats fare with an occasional minimal embellishment. And as has been the case whenever Darnielle has chosen a studio over his trusty Panasonic boombox, the end result sounds somewhat thin-- especially considering the more delicate strum-style he's been developing of late. A few exceptions are pleasant, like the Casio-fed "Southwood Plantation Road" or the bright piano line that runs through "No Children" before the delightfully/horrifically bitter singalong chorus, but songs like "Peacock" and "Idylls of the King" are over-wispy. Johnny Goat's usual lyrical acuity also comes slightly short of his usual track record, as he unveils one of the best entries from his notebook of "Love is like..." similes (in this case, it's like "the border between Greece and Albania") only to later drop the dud, "People say friends don't destroy one another/ What do they know about friends?"

These transgressions are somewhat forgiven, however, by "Oceanographer's Choice", Tallahassee's only song to truly come through with the full-band promise, and a breathtaking portrait of the usual relationship violence becoming physical. With drums and ominous organ that finally add some urgency to the story, and sad, sliding electric guitar swooping in and out like symbolic crows, the music finally measures up to the emotional intensity of Darnielle's imagery. When the band drops out, the scene freezes, and the characters fully realize the consequences of their meltdown: "What will I do when I don't have you?"

Suffice to say, if the rest of Tallahassee lived up to the standard set by "Oceanographer's Choice", we'd have a surefire candidate here for Concept Album of the Year. However, Tallahassee is not even 2002's second best song cycle about disintegrating love (it's succeeded by Pedro the Lion's Control and Black Heart Procession's Amore del Tropico). While Tallahassee, as literature, is richly detailed, even stunning on occasion, Darnielle's apparent phobia for full-band arrangements prevents the music from keeping pace with the storylines. It's an admirable experiment, but not one that will likely find its way to the podium come election time.