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.)

John Darnielle writes about the fatally self-destructive temptation for artists to respond to bad reviews online:

And while we’re reading Mr. Mountain Goats, check out this posting which explains why the Mountain Goats are more like Bruce Springsteen than you ever imagined possible. (Via Largehearted Boy)

Here are some things that have happened lately that are good:

Reissues of two previously unavailable early Mountain Goats albums, Zopilote Machine and Nothing For Juice, are now available. These are great if you are already tuned in to John Darnielle’s taut no-fi frequency; if not, last year’s We Shall All Be Healed remains the best intro. (Though if you go download “Sinaloan Milk Snake Song” you just might end up disagreeing with me and thinking that those older albums make a plenty fine intro, too.) A new album, The Sunset Tree, looms next month as well.

JD Lasica and Marc Canter, working with the Internet Archive, have opened the doors on their Ourmedia project — free hosting for video and audio files. I’m looking forward to playing with it.

Google Maps is here, and doesn’t seem to be going away, and it’s just really good. And you know, what’s good about it isn’t exactly the same as what’s cool about it. I mean, it’s fun to use the “Ajax”-powered thingies and slide the map around by grabbing it. But what makes it where I go now when I need to find something is that it’s much easier to read than the older services — which I assume will now frantically scramble to catch up. (It also claims not to work in my Opera browser, but in fact works just fine — though the scrolling is smoother in Firefox.)

A little while ago someone posted to Metafilter a link to old live videos from 1981 of the Replacements singing a number of songs. I looked to see if “Johnny’s Gonna Die” was there, and it was.

The first Replacements album, 1981’s “Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash,” was an explosion of punk brattiness in ultra-short bursts. The band members were still basically kids, and a lot of their music was fun but, well, disposable, as the album title promises.

Nestled there at the very end of Side One, though, was this desolate ache of a song, and it’s still a heartbreaker. The music begins with a sarcastic nod to the Byrds’ “So You Wanna Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” — a tongue-in-cheek vision to begin with, but the Replacements turn its rollicking bass line and chiming guitars into something hollow and stark. The lyrics simply declare the certain fate of a certain musician: Johnny Thunders was going to die. A decade later, he did. (Heroin will do that.) A few years later, so did Bob Stinson, the Replacements guitarist whose simple barren solos fill the song’s empty spaces. Watch him in that video, hammering on the high string.

From Elvis to Vicious to Cobain, self-destructive rock stars have cut a path across the decades that young musicians understandably find magnetic. Somehow, here at the very start of their career, the Replacements managed to stare down that whole bundle of mythology. When I saw the band play this song at a tiny club in Cambridge a few years after that video was recordered, I remember wondering about the snotty edge of “Johnny’s Gonna Die”: those “nah nah nahs,” like a schoolyard taunt, or the kiss-off in its closing “Bye bye.” Affection? Self-protection? I don’t know. Those lips were curled, but if you looked close, you could see them quiver.

In my years as a working theater critic, one of the things I occasionally did to amuse myself, in those desperate hours between an 11 p.m. curtain and a 2 a.m. deadline, was to write my review in the style of the artist whose work I was covering: a kind of critical Stockholm Syndrome, you might say. For instance, I recall, in one fit of near-insanity, writing a bunch of paragraphs of a review of a John Cage festival, then printing them out, cutting them up with scissors, and scattering them on the floor. The random reordering worked nicely, as it turned out. But I took the increasing frequency with which this impulse arose as a sign that it was time for me to move on to something else.

I still enjoy reading a nice turn in this vein, though. Here’s one: Brian Dear’s review of a Laurie Anderson show, told in that performance artist’s detached-chant voice.

I’ve been enjoying reading music critic Alex Ross’s blog over at “The Rest is Noise” for some time now. This thoughtful comment on the role of the critic caught my eye — it pretty well sums up what I aspired to in the many years I devoted to writing about theater and movies:

“As a critic, I’m obliged to describe musical reality precisely as I hear it; I can’t sway in the breeze of intermission chatter. All the same, I want to write a review that will be of use even to a listener who had an entirely different experience. This entails writing with a certain humble awareness that my experience is not universal, that my account will never be carved in granite. Criticism is at its best where confidence meets generosity. It’s a tricky business: the slide into fake omniscience is deliciously quick. But I’m working on it.”

Over the years I have accumulated a large collection of cassette tapes. Typically, I’d own LPs (later, CDs) but I’d transfer them to cassette to listen to them in the car. You could fit two LPs on one C-90, so it was efficient, and everyone knows that music and driving go together like, say, cinnamon and sugar. (Convenience of this sort is, of course, on the wane as the world of “digital rights management” tries to lock down everything it can.)

This was my mode for many years; I still remember debating whether it was worth dubbing my multi-LP set of Laurie Anderson’s “United States” to listen to during the cross-country drive in 1986 as I moved my life from Boston to San Francisco. I knew I’d made the right choice somewhere on I-80 on the long, slow climb up from the plains on the Nebraska/Wyoming border. Anderson’s voice intoned its futuristic alienations and fragile hopes as I hung suspended between two coasts and two lives, and the wind began roaring down from the mountains, buffeting my old car back toward the past. (I also listened to a lot of Buddy Holly — alienation only gets you so far.)

I’ll keep those tapes, and a handful of others. But I’ve got hundreds more that just duplicate music I have in other, better formats. So what does one do with several hundred old cassette tapes? They were once reasonably high quality blanks; it seems criminal to toss them in landfill. I’d welcome any ideas.

My musical find of the last few months, and an album whose melancholy vitality has helped me through the post-election letdown: The Long Winters‘ “When I Pretend to Fall.”

I can’t even remember how I got pointed in this band’s direction. The music at first sounds like fairly typical alt/indie fare (the album opener, “Blue Diamonds,” reminiscent of Spoon), but a couple of listens and John Roderick’s songs start to burrow into your psyche. It’s all good, but there are three gems: “Cinnamon,” whose warm luster — that’s REM’s Pete Buck on mandolin — swaddles the singer’s grief (”I clung to the stretcher, I drew them a heart”); “It’ll Be a Breeze,” a simple acoustic love song that cuts to the core, like a Dashboard Confessional ditty that’s been through something harrowing; and “New Girl,” a rollicking 1-5-4 rocker with mischievous lyrics (”Twice you burned your life’s work / Once to start a new life / And once just to start a fire”) and a bridge of escalating taunts.

Go ahead, there’s free MP3s here, though sadly not of any of those songs.

If all that weren’t enough, check out the cover’s 1970s typography and gnarly rainbow-as-Gordian-knot graphic.

This fast-cut edit of Republican convention rhetoric strips the Bush campaign down to its essence.

John Darnielle, the amazing singer-songwriter mastermind of the Mountain Goats, also runs a Web site of writing on popular music called Last Plane to Jakarta. He recently switched to using blog software on his site, so there’s an RSS feed you can subscribe to. I have.

Flickr, the superb photo-sharing web application I wrote about last month, is now selling “pro” accounts for people who expect to upload a lot of photos. (”Preview pricing” is about $40/year, discounted for now from the planned full price of $60.) I’ve signed up for two years. Great design and good service online are worth paying for.

For the past several weeks I’ve accumulated a set of links that I wanted to present and comment on. Each could warrant a full blog entry. But since the chaos of my life and schedule means that instead I’ve just been sitting on them, I’m just going to post them in a big underannotated lump. Better than not posting them at all, and probably what I should have done in the first place, one by one. If you’re an avid follower of blogs you’ll probably have seen many of these already.

Teresa Neilsen Hayden’s amazing compendium of “Lord of the Rings” parodies provided me with a nearly inexhaustible supply of merriment.

The long view: Greg Costikyan, with whom I don’t always agree but whose thoughts I will always read avidly, points out that the U.S. will not always be the “sole superpower” — providing a good, self-interested reason for us to pay a little more attention to international law:

Danny O’Brien posts on the elusive and increasingly central issue of just how much fame and celebrity will satisfy us in an era when the middle ground — famous for 15 minutes, famous for 15 (or 150) people — keeps expanding. (This is the aspect of blogging that professional journalists, used to measuring readership by commercial standards, typically miss.)

Danah Boyd pinpoints many of the problems with the current wave of social software in her talk on “Autistic social software” from Supernova. Good reading for anyone who thinks that “social software” started with Friendster — but valuable as well for those of us who already know the longer history here:

Creative Commons is doing important work in helping keep open a space for creative reuse of content in an era of hegemonic copyrightism. The organization recently moved in to share the office space for Mitch Kapor’s Open Source Applications Foundation, where I’ve been spending a lot of time researching my book. Regular readers here know of my enthusiasm for the music of the Mountain Goats. So it tickled me to read recently on the Creative Commons blog that the Goats’ John Darnielle has okayed the hosting of a free archive of live shows at the Internet Archive. Darnielle has a low-tech preference for old-fashioned tape trading over the online approach — but the main thing is, he wants people to hear his music, and once they do, many will, as I have, become voracious purchasers of actual Mountain Goats CDs. Creative Commons, the Internet Archive, the Mountain Goats — how can you go wrong?

Hugh MacLeod, whose trademark art is drawing cartoons on the back of business cards, has posted an ever-evolving list of thoughts and ideas on creativity that’s great reading. For instance:

And, finally, a quote from Norman Mailer, via Jay Rosen’s commentary on Mailer’s coverage of the 1960 Democratic Convention — an old one, but, for me, in the “paste this one on your monitor” class: