Review Summary: We shall all be...
You like to think that you’ll have it figured out by the time you die, that surely nobody can live for so long without learning the secret or whether there even is one. You think maybe you’re missing out on some crucial parts of life because you can’t stop thinking of how it will end, but you also think that those crucial parts won’t be so crucial without knowing what they add up to. And every day you seem to get farther and farther away from the answers.
So you listen to The Mountain Goats.
You listen to the horns and the lovely vocal harmonizing, and you know the weight you feel will never lighten, but you also know that it will become easier to bear. You listen to the deep, resonant piano chords and you feel them inside of yourself more than anything, internal hammers tapping and vibrating something buried and forgotten. And the old mainstay, the acoustic guitar, is as vital as ever, or maybe even more so, every chord a pinprick into the ballooning expanse of despair, slowly draining it away and making room for warm breath and blood and touch. Mostly you just hear a little bit of darkness underneath everything that seems to contrast with the pale yellow of the moon and make it a little brighter.
What you find in Transcendental Youth aren’t answers to any big questions, but instead questions to a bunch of answers that never meant anything before but now seem exceedingly important, like what happens to lonely people when you never see them again? And what do you see in the stars if you let the dots connect themselves? These things – some of them – are things you perhaps never wanted to know, or feel like you shouldn’t know. It all seems like too much for one mind – for your mind – weighed down already by things you tell yourself are trivial but that also never let you rest. As the horns and drums and piano fade away, you think, maybe, that you know some things that you didn’t set out to know, but you
know them, and anything is better than the ceaseless thinking and wondering that make up your days, even if it is just the knowledge of what it means to be hurt, and what it means to be healed.
