Album Review: Mark Mulcahy - The Gus
In the year 2019, there are, more than likely, three ways
that you would have come upon The Gus,
the new solo outing from singer and songwriter Mark Mulcahy.
1—You are older
than I am.
Recently, I turned 36, which puts me toward the younger end
of the spectrum found in Mulcahy’s fan base. Before he was a solo artist, he
spent the 1980s, and into the very early part of the 1990s, fronting the much
loved, and now much mythologized, cult ‘college rock’ band, Miracle Legion.
As jangly and infectious as their counterparts in, say,
R.E.M., Miracle Legion could never get out of that shadow—label woes and line
up changes did not help things either, and following the release of what
became, in a sense, a lost album (1996’s Portrait of A Damaged Family) the group fizzled out completely and Mulcahy went solo
shortly there after.
Miracle Legion formed the year I was born, and issued its
debut EP the following year, so if you were actually in college, listening to ‘college rock’ on your campus’ radio
station in the 1980s, or happened to be some kind of incredibly hip teenager
and were aware of bands of this nature, my guess is you’ve followed the
trajectory of Mulcahy’s career throughout the rest of the 90s, into the 2000s,
and to today, with The Gus, his sixth
solo full-length LP.
2—Ciao, My Shining Star
A decade ago, The Shout Factory gathered together a large
stable of artists—some of them very
well known, some of them less so, and put together a tribute album of Mulcahy’s
music—spanning his entire canon up to that point.
Calling it a ‘tribute’ album is a bit of a misnomer, because
it was more of a fundraiser, or benefit, for Mulcahy and his family than
anything else—portions from the album’s sale were given to him following the
sudden passing of his wife the year prior, leaving him with, at the time, two
young daughters to care for.
Released as a single CD, and an expanded digital version in
iTunes, Ciao, My Shining Star, in
whatever form you found it and listened to it, could be uneven at times in
terms of artistry and quality, but it made the best out of its marquee names,
including Michael Stipe, making a rare solo appearance prior to the disbanding
of R.E.M., Dinosaur JR, Frank Black, The National, and probably the biggest
name out of them all to be included, Thom Yorke, taking a glitchy but gorgeous
turn on the Miracle Legion tune “All For The Best.”
3—You grew up in
the 1990s, and watched “The Adventures of Pete and Pete.”
While Miracle Legion were on the verge of breaking up, and
working through a bad record deal with Morgan Creek for their one and only
‘major label’ effort, Drenched, the
band was approached to be featured in one episode of, and contribute music for,
a live-action series on Nickelodeon—“The Adventures of Pete and Pete.”
An eccentric show about two red-haired brothers, both named
Pete, the mournful, bittersweet, and nostalgic tone of Mulcahy’s songwriting
matched the backdrop of the series perfectly—the songs (some of his best,
truthfully)—recorded under the fictionalized moniker Polaris—are as important,
if not more so, than the quirky, imaginative, surrealist coming of age story
that, in the 20+ years since its final episode aired, has amassed possibly a
larger cult following than Mulcahy himself.
Mulcahy issued the soundtrack to the show via his own
imprint, Mezzotint, in 1999, and reissued it on vinyl 16 years after that—and
his involvement with an idiosyncratic children’s television show is why there
is a somewhat large portion of his fan base that weren’t even walking yet, or
in some cases, not even born yet, when Miracle Legion first formed.
*
On almost all of Mark Mulcahy’s solo albums, especially the
ones released after his return to music in 2013, there is a ‘moment.’ A song
that, tonally, is a little different from the others—a little more pensive, a
little more somber or melancholic, with a little gentler of an arrangement.
On Dear Mark J.Mulcahy, I Love You, it’s “The Rabbit.” Perhaps I was drawn to it simply
because of its name, or perhaps it was the swooning, swaying way with which
Mulcahy performs the song on an acoustic guitar, letting his voice tumble down,
almost whimsically at times, over the strums of the string.
On The Possum in The Driveway, his fifth solo album, released in 2017, it’s the album’s closing
track—again, swaying in a way that the songs arriving before it did not—what
makes “Geraldine” a fascinating song is the inclusion of a saxophone, very lightly brushed percussion keeping
time against a rumbling bass line, and a mournful Rhodes piano twinkling in the
background.
It also, uncharacteristic of Mulcahy, finds him singing in a
higher, though a little reserved, range—something he rarely does.
On The Gus, that
moment arrives right out of the gate.
Nobody really writes ‘murder ballads’ anymore, do they?
Like, it’s a thing, but they are difficult things to do, and to do well, and
not make your audience uncomfortable. D’Angelo, on his debut album, has what
is, more or less, a ‘murder ballad,’ in the form of “Shit, Damn, Motherfucker.”
And Nick Cave did release an entire album entitled Murder Ballads, with The Bad Seeds in
the early 1990s.
The opening track of The
Gus, “Wicked World,” is almost too beautiful to be about what it’s actually
about.
Perhaps he’s always been this way—maybe more so on recent
efforts—but on The Gus, Mulcahy is
just as much of a storyteller in these 10 songs as he is a ‘songwriter.’
Partially inspired by reading George Saunders (a short story writer who
released a sprawling, dizzying debut novel, Lincoln
in The Bardo, at the beginning of 2017), Mulcahy, himself, is not present in
these songs, but rather, he has written short fictions set to music, or at the
very least, created characters that sustain themselves throughout the course of
a pop song.
It takes a few listens through “Wicked World” to fully grasp
what it’s about, and even then, it’s hard to believe that, unfolding across the
song’s gorgeous five minutes, is a shifting narrative that winds up to be about
a killing spree. A man walking his dog; a woman dashing around the corner to
visit the object of her affection; someone nodding off at a bus stop—all of
these people, shockingly, wind up dead, as Mulcahy strums a sparse electric
guitar, an additional layer of strings arrives to make things even more
dramatic, and a surprising guest vocalist—Rain Phoenix (of those Phoenixes)—takes the song’s second verse, adding a real sense
of believability to the ‘characters’ Mulcahy has written.
It may not be as personal or emotional as some of the songs
he wrote for “Pete and Pete,” or as devastating and heartbroken as “You’re The
One, Lee,” from the Miracle Legion album Me
and Mr. Ray—but it is imaginative enough, and haunting in its beauty, to
linger with you well after you’ve finished listening, and it cements itself
among Mulcahy’s finest penned material.
But that’s just the album’s first song—there are still nine
others.
*
The Gus, as a
whole, is an uneven listen; that may be due to the nature of its ‘character’
driven songwriting, or that may be because there are uneven moments on other Mark
Mulcahy solo albums as well. While it may not be a momentum building opening
track—it is one, however, that knocks the wind out of you—“Wicked World” is not
indicative of what is to come as the rest of The Gus unfolds, as the pacing, and energy, shifts dramatically
from song to song, until the end.
As a songwriter, Mulcahy sometimes, as he’s aged especially,
has a difficult time trying to strike the balance between earnestness and
whimsy—sometimes he finds it, other times there can be too much of one, and not
enough of the other. Usually, there are a few too many whimsical elements in a
song. One of The Gus’ first singles,
“Taking Baby Steps” suffers from that—the huge, snarling guitar strums that
come right at the beginning, and crash down behind Mulcahy during the verses,
but there’s something about when the song takes a turn, as he sings the titular
phrase—it just doesn’t balance out.
There are other moments, too, throughout, where the whimsy,
or focus on humor, detracts from the song—“People: Beware” brings the cringes
early when Mulcahy begins pontificating, “Let’s
talk about Drugs 101,” and both the reflection on life in Trump’s America
of “Mr. Bell,” and the dramatic “A Long Time Ago,” arriving in the latter half
of the album, bring its momentum to a screeching halt, simply due to their
turgid pacing.
“Happy Boat,” also parked near the album’s conclusion, is
among The Gus’s most musically
interesting—pulling Mulcahy and his group of players away from the
freewheeling, jangly indie rock he’s been synonymous with for his career, and
finds a more restrained, borderline ‘adult contemporary’ groove; more
surprising than the stylistic direction of the song is that it actually works,
and works well.
*
There’s something very familiar—almost eerily familiar about
the way the guitar sounds on “I Won’t Tell Anyone But You,” the song that
arrives on The Gus’ halfway point.
Mulcahy has always favored guitar effects that only add, or accentuate the
jangle to his jangle pop sound—a bulk of the “Pete and Pete” soundtrack is
drenched in heavy chorus pedal use, as is his solo debut, Fathering, from 1997.
“I Won’t Tell Anyone But You,” save for the aging you can
hear in his voice, sounds like was pulled right out of the mid 1990s, thanks to
that wavering shimmer you can hear in the huge strums of Mulcahy’s electric guitar—however,
it’s juxtaposed against a fuzzed out, rumbling bass line, and sharp, slithering
rhythm from the drums, creating a fascinating dichotomy as Mulcahy, more or
less, speak-sings his way through the song’s lyrics.
In it, near the end of the refrain, he sings, “It’s simpler to stick to what you know.”
This line stuck out to me, right away, during my first
listen of The Gus, and it’s resonated
with each subsequent listen, but now, as this review heads toward a conclusion,
I am giving that line thought again because I may be taking it, critically
speaking, in two ways.
The most obvious, when hearing something that sneering, set
against the artist’s most familiar sound, is to take it as tongue in cheek and
self aware—Mulcahy, himself, is sticking to what he knows, in a sense.
But after enough times through The Gus, even with the few outstanding moments I’ve found, the
initial charm the album had worn off. Perhaps that comes from listening to
specific album, a number of times in a short period of time, for critical
analysis rather than enjoyment; or perhaps it comes from the fact that, at the
end of the day, The Gus can be a
difficult album. It’s not ‘unfriendly’ to the ears, but it, due to its nature,
is lacking an easy point of entry, and at times, especially when the pacing
slows, or things become too esoteric, keeps its listener at an arm’s length.
It seems such a cheap joke to say Mulcahy should ‘stick to
what he knows,’ because he’s done that—he resurrected Miracle Legion for one ‘final’
tour and issued a live album from those shows in 2017; he did the same with
Polaris, too, which itself was a bit of an inside joke for the band and long
time fans who were aware that Polaris, as a band, had never played live since
their inception.
‘Stick to what you know’ implies that experimentation or
pushing yourself in a new creative direction is a bad thing, or frowned upon—and
that’s not the case. But with The Gus,
save for those few captivating moments, is an album that finds Mulcahy’s
musical fictions to be ones of diminishing returns.
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