Purple Mountains (2019)

Three of the four best songs on Purple Mountains by Purple Mountains were released ahead of the album last year as singles, attempting to generate some buzz and sales, in part because main man David Berman was hoping to get out from under some debt he'd racked up since his time with the Silver Jews (an act I don't know well). The titles tell their own story, which you can see are likely somewhat short on typical commercial appeal: "All My Happiness Is Gone," "Darkness and Cold," and "Margaritas at the Mall." The fourth has a much brighter title in "I Loved Being My Mother's Son," but the past tense puts it back more in range of the rest. In fact, the song is plainly part of Berman dealing with the loss of his mother in 2014, and in fact, Berman, 52, committed suicide a few weeks after this album's release last summer. It's thus tempting to file it under cry for help but for me it's a lot more than that. It's the best album of 2020, in terms of speaking to 2020, even if it came out last year and the auteur never saw a day of 2020. As an album it is ready for the end. At its best, in "All My Happiness Is Gone," it gets to the isolated places Big Star reached in Third, where self-pity and grief are nearly indistinguishable and feel overwhelmingly inescapable and so an unlikely heroic tone takes hold. Purple Mountains may not be a great album—it has ups and downs, some shallow patches and things I'm still not sure about—but it certainly has great songs. "All My Happiness Is Gone" by itself sets the tone as an over-the-top broadside, which Berman himself appears to have recognized in b-side remixes called "All My Happiness Is Wrong" and "All My Happiness Is Long."

"All My Happiness Is Gone" is an over-the-top broadside, wallowing in wallowing, but with a certain balm that droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven. It bombs in already flying high with a thrusting rock band floating a wheedling mellotron figure out front, all of which only elevates at the chorus and bridge back to the verses. The verses are litanies of everyday ruminations—nothing specific, all blandly evocative: "Feels like something really wrong has happened / And I confess I'm barely hanging on." Berman's voice is deep and resonant, almost croaking, and it's glum, depressed, absolutely, yet I hear it as life-affirming (however "ironical") in the way it so shamelessly soars over the heartbeat rhythm section which powers it. It is often wrenching when it comes up randomly, unexpectedly. The next-best song, "I Loved Being My Mother's Son," this impossibly open-hearted thing, makes me think of my own mother and her death nearly 40 years ago. I didn't have the kind of relationship with her Berman describes in this song. In a way I feel like I should envy him, but somehow instead his song opens me more to her own best qualities in memory. I may not have loved being my mother's son at the most conscious level in my 20s, but this song helps me see that actually I did and still do. I'm only sorry she couldn't live to see me come all the way around. And I'm sorry Berman couldn't live to carry on. I wish he wouldn't have done it. The pleasures of "Margaritas at the Mall" and especially "Darkness and Cold" are his obvious self-awareness on a level that he was being a bit, well, you know, "dark." Drinking at the mall may not be the best way to cope, but it's coping. As for "Darkness and Cold," with its lonesome hobo harmonica and sobbing female backing vocal, I hear it as a somewhat humorous deadpan self-lampoon of his tendency toward evoking the abyss on a regular basis. Well, there it is again, folks. The abyss. On the other hand it might be the actual cry for help, and that makes me uneasy. But the band plays warm and affectionate all through this album—there's a lot of love in this music.