Longtime readers here know of my enthusiasm for the music of the Mountain Goats. Their new album, The Sunset Tree, is out, and it’s extraordinary. Singer/songwriter John Darnielle gets directly autobiographical here; where his previous outing, We Shall All Be Healed, was a series of recollections and epitaphs for friends and acquaintances from time spent among doomed speed freaks, this one is about his own experiences trying to grow up in a house with a violent stepfather.
That of course makes it sound like the most tiresome sort of confessional singer-songwriting; but when you take this kind of autobiographical material and run it through the loom of the imagination rather than the mill of therapy, something different emerges. There’s poetry here, and exquisite music-making, and more than a little wry humor, and a sense that youthful pain remembered and sung about is better than youth simply forgotten.
And so we have songs like “This Year,” a beaten-down teenage boy’s answer to “I Will Survive” (“I am gonna make it through this year / IF IT KILLS ME”) set to an ostinato hook, and “Dance Music,” with a perky melody playing counterpoint to scenes of domestic mayhem, and “Up the Wolves’s” Romulus-and-Remus parable of growing up wild, and “Pale Green Things,” a delicate tune that close out the album on a note less of reconciliation than of simple witness.
There’s less of We Shall All Be Healed’s Velvets-derived rock, more cello and mandolin in the mix. Each song is memorable, the production (John Vanderslice) is autumnally intimate, the effect stunning. I’m tempted to say something like “abuse never sounded so good,” but rather than trivialize The Sunset Tree with that kind of throwaway line, I’ll just say how glad I am to have it in my ears and head.
(Amazon has a good interview with Darnielle, and streams four songs from the album. For more Goats detail, there’s Jim Fisher’s in-depth study.)
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