Bleed Out
John Darnielle’s inspirations run broader than most, and at least a fair amount deeper: you not only believe he cares deeply about the reasons why subcultural phenomena like pro wrestling (Beat the Champ), high fantasy (In League with Dragons), and goths (Goths) fascinate him, but why and how they shape the lives of others, and how those people internalize all those milieu’s contradictions and ways of being evasive. For Bleed Out, he draws his empathetic readings from the world of the action thriller — cinematic, for the most part, and explicitly so in giddy genre-exercise whether they’re sincere examinations of tropes like “Training Montage” or iconoclastic “John Rambo never went to Vietnam”-level reality-checks like “First Blood.” And since his long-running backing band has proven to play even more to the strength of Darnielle’s emotional intensity than John’s old one-man tape-hiss era did, Bleed Out has a full-powered breadth to its scope that bursts out like squibs in a giallo flick. A knuckles-out tension permeates this record that never really lets up on its relentless Point Blank Lee Marvin drive until the last-gasp closer title cut. But when the route runs through clean-lined post-alt-rock (“Mark On You”), deceptively triumphant yet searingly doomed Americana (“Hostages”), and paranoia-stoking Blondie-esque disco (“Guys on Every Corner”) it’s best not to let up on the gas.