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.)

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.

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.