When one of the remaining members of the crew—Adam, his name a wicked twist on biblical allusion—walks into the sea and drowns himself on “Rocks in my Pocket,” the pathos is wrenching: “Some people name their cars or their guitars,” he comments on the eponymous stones, “Some things are too fragile to name.” Ditto when the album’s unnamed, 16-year-old protagonist asks Peter Balkan, “Will you lie still while I reapply your bandage?” Darnielle shows the thinness of the line between rite of passage and funeral rite. We’re made to think of how global warming-related disasters instantaneously transform hum-drum lives into mortal battles with nature. “It’s time for you to go/But you never lost your glow,” Darnielle laments in the stirring “Your Glow,” which he expands to encompass the whole globe: “If there’s nothing left but water/Then let water be enough.” The human spirit preserves, just as the world will keep turning in the absence of people.
This conceit is weighty, sometimes profound, and also pat for a songwriter who has created towering dramas with more quotidian stakes —the aging of the counterculture, which he depicted with exceptional poignance on 2015’s Goths, or the horror of living with an abusive stepfather, a theme that courses through 2005’s classic The Sunset Tree. These works are sinuous, robust and thick with implication, while Through This Fire proceeds with event after event, and even as Darnielle’s words cut to the quick, we feel as if his songcraft glides across the surface. Take closer “Broken to Begin With,” with its swelling guitar solo that echoes his friends in the Hold Steady. Presumably in the waning minutes of his existence on earth, the adolescent speaker pictures his campsite discovered in years to come by “Men of old who sailed the seas.” The notion of a civilization destroying itself to rise again in a pre-industrial mode is crushingly resonant, but its exploration of the mysteries of existence feels too predetermined. An abrupt restatement of the chorus of “Cold At Night” finishes the LP and only contributes to its overall air of slightness. Through This Fire seems confused about whether it wants to reach for miniaturist genius or ambitious sweep—the Mountain Goats managed to achieve both in the past.
On occasion, Darnielle allows us to reach for our own connections, rather than setting them in our hands, wrapped in wisdom and a perfect sense of meter. “Everything that sinks will float,” he repeats in his relentless sing-song on “The Lady From Shanghai 2.” This statement envisions a poetic fate for the corpses of lost sailors, but it also resuscitates a memorable tidbit for fans: on the band’s last record, 2023’s Jenny From Thebes, the titular character, a woman devoted to protecting the threatened outcasts of West Texas, murders a ne’er-do-well landlord, stores his body in a water tower, and then sets him free, to “float downstream.” Death may be inevitable, but Darnielle casts out lifelines in his work, rescuing old motifs in order to refuse simple interpretations, tidy conclusions, and despair. And so his practice feels bottomless, while Through This Fire pushes ever forward as if its author had a destination in mind when he began the journey of writing. Such unswerving momentum is a mistake for which his immense skill can only partially compensate. The ocean, after all, is not just wide, it’s deep.
