The Extra Lens: "Cruiserweights"

John Darnielle has made his love of boxing pretty clear over the years. His personal website, Mus Mus Tail, was almost exclusively about prizefighting, a boxer graced the cover of the desolate, accurately-titled Get Lonely, and throughout the touring for The Life of the World To Come (2009) he often wore a shirt about Filipino boxer/singer/senator Manny Pacquaio and the team that makes Floyd Mayweather fear him. So it’s only fitting that he publish a song at least tangentially about the sport, title a record Undercard, design its cover like a bill, and put an austere, empty boxing ring on the front.

The fighter at the center of “Cruiserweights” is a typical John Darnielle Character: he went to jail, he performs for no one in an anonymous arena, he is in pain but he is almost free from that pain and he may live to tell it that he was stronger than it was. There are a few choice phrases here, all of which benefit from Darnielle’s indoor-voice delivery and careful enunciation: starting a verse with “And there’s a whole long list of other things I hate,” coming to a chorus with “There’s a whole long list of other things to do / And the best ones I won’t probably get around to,” the initial description of the scene, its worthlessness, its protagonist’s desperation. It’s nothing new, but he sells it effortlessly.

The Extra Lens differs from the Mountain Goats in that their songs are viewed as full-on musical collaborations between John Darnielle and Franklin Bruno, rather than Franklin Bruno contributing to Mountain Goats songs—meaning, at least according to the album’s press release, that Darnielle sang and left everything else to his collaborator. Here, Bruno’s arrangement evokes similar territory to his best moments on Get Lonely (2006). His piano playing, and especially the way he approaches playing the chords that open many of these lines, adds a rich texture and makes this otherwise slight, by-numbers-for-these-guys song utterly compelling. “Cleveland, Ohio, 1985” shouldn’t be the entirety of a good chorus; it says almost nothing, but the two of them get away with it here completely.

Unlike the earlier Extra Glenns material (for this record, the G and an N have been dropped), this is far less outright clever or songwriterly in the way that Franklin Bruno’s work tends to be. This is okay; even if the two of them push into territory they’ve explored before, it’s still a striking, melodically gorgeous thing, as replayable as anything else that this duo has assembled in the past.

:: Stream the track @ MergeRecords.com