Jenny From Thebes＜Yellow & Black Vinyl＞

John Darnielle is as much if a storyteller as he is a songwriter. As the leader of the Mountain Goats, he writes a lot of songs, and very good ones, but instead of penning three-verse meditations on love, the weather, or the state of the world, he writes brief episodes in the lives of his characters, which often cohere into a larger narrative on his albums. It makes sense that Darnielle is also a successful novelist, and just as many novelists of note feature recurring characters in their tales. For 2023s Jenny from Thebes, hes taken another look at someone who first popped up on 2002s All Hail West Texas. Jenny is a woman with a checkered past who lives in the American Southwest in a single-story house thats become a way station for other troubled souls, most of whom are in various degrees of danger or suffering the consequences of bad choices. Darnielle only tells us so much about Jennys past and why shes opened her home to these characters, but the vignettes are compelling and feel honest -- from a guy whose tattoo reminds him too much of what happened the day he got his ink, to someone on the run after a dead body is found in a citys water tower. As a lyricist, Darnielles greatest gift is not his narrative sense, but how he lets his characters reveal themselves and their view of the world, and if Jenny from Thebes is a bit more cryptic than his best work, every song contains a yarn worth hearing, and his quietly bold, ordinary-guy delivery is surprisingly flexible, adjusting itself to fit any situation he presents. The music often suggests a nervy variant on 70s soft rock (complete with mellow saxophones on "Great Pirates" and slick string charts on "Jenny III"), and his musicians -- Alicia Bognanno on guitar, Matt Douglas on guitar and keyboards, Peter Hughes on bass, and Jon Wurster on drums and percussion -- execute the material brilliantly, skillfully adjusting their attack to suit each chapter in the story. Its an open question: Are we going to encounter Jenny and her rogues gallery again on a future Mountain Goats album? In the meantime, Jenny from Thebes suggests her house still has a few stories worth hearing. ~ Mark Deming