Empty Country - Empty Country II

Just how late is Late Stage Capitalism? As David Berman, one of the spiritual anchors of this second Empty Country LP and for whom one of its showpiece tracks is named, once said, ‘it gets late so early now’. And wouldn't you just know it Dave, it goes on forever, too. This is the inconvenient truth that occupies the heart of Empty Country II, the latest and to-date greatest from Staten Island's Joseph D'Agostino. Few songwriters in the last ten-15 years have written so richly of America’s cultural decline as D’Agostino, the shock and awe of his country's decaying psyche and moral abjection traced vividly across several albums as Cymbals Eat Guitars and now two as Empty Country. Even by those high standards, this latest nine-song collection feels especially ambitious, a lyrically dense set of character studies that enigmatically blur authorial voice and moral binaries, and render them against a backdrop of ecstatic (NOT euphoric) rock dynamics. The biographical headlines will turn some heads - funded via Patreon; recorded with super-producer John Agnello at Mitch Easter's studio - but for me they're the least interesting things to cling to here. It's been some time since i've connected so closely with music of the type that Empty Country play, so why this record now? I’ve seen ECII described elsewhere as emo-adjacent indie rock, shorthand I take mild objection to not least because I find what presently passes for emo as creative deadweight. And it doesn’t seem sufficient in capturing the imagination required to construct such a dense and labyrinthine set of lyrical motifs and memorable epigrammatic flourishes (where else might you find Goethe's Erkönig as metaphor for the ongoing state-supported slaughter of American high school students?). Still, removed from its genre codification, 'emotional rock' isn’t an entirely inelegant way of understanding what Empty Country are reaching for. D’Agostino has detailed this record as him being ‘radically himself’ and there’s an unavoidable heart-on-sleeve testifying at the core of these songs. A shouting into the void. Or from the void. From the precipice, about The End, because it’s the last - only - thing left to do. 'Erlking' concludes with the simply breathtaking line, ‘It’s a little late to be afraid’, providing an indubitable axiom for our times as well as perfectly encapsulating the spirit of a Great American record that arrives at just the moment when such a concept is in its death throes. And so we have it, The Last Great American Record. Where an explosion and a star might be the same dreaded thing.