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The Mountain Goats, Mountain Goats Sunset TreeDetails
Title: The Sunset Tree
Release date: 26 April, 2005
Record label: 4ad Records / Wb Us
Single:
Official website: The Mountain Goats
Wikipedia: The Mountain Goats
Popular Songs
New Songs
Tracklisting
- 1. You Or Your Memory
- Broom People
- This Year
- Dilaudid
- Dance Music
- Dinu Lipatti's Bones
- Up The Wolves
- Lion's Teeth
- Hast Thou Considered The Tetrapod?
- Magpie
- Song For Dennis Brown
- Love Love Love
- Pale Green Things
The Mountain Goats - The Sunset Tree
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John Darnielle is one of the most imaginative lyricists of his generation. Since he sat down cross-legged with an acoustic guitar in front of a boom box and...
... pressed record for the first time - more than a decade ago -
skewed characters, vibrant images and perfectly-framed narratives have
flowed in the hundreds. In that time, he has conjured - from laconic,
blazing phrases - insights into a multitude of vivid alternative
realities. He has inhabited the minds of murderers and suicides,
prophets and emperors. He has documented a disintegrating, alcoholic
marriage (in the "Alpha" series), the inner lives of teenage metal fans
("The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton") and the final moments of
prehistoric sacrificial victims ("Tollund Man"). He has even brought to
life a world so improbably perfect that the Chicago Cubs could win a
World Series ("Cubs In Five").
It's a mark of his extraordinary
fertility that, of the 400-plus songs that Darnielle has recorded, only
a handful directly concern his own life experience. But his last album
for 4AD, 2004’s We Shall All Be Healed - marked a change in approach by
revisiting and reconstructing a dark period in his early life; a time
of seedy apartments, makeshift friendships, cheap substances and
unscheduled trips to the hospital. And his new record, The Sunset Tree,
goes further still. Darnielle's stepfather passed away in December
2003; and shortly afterward, as the Mountain Goats toured Europe, these
new, intensely personal songs started to flow. They began in a Paris
hotel, were worked on in dingy dressing rooms and hired vans, and four
of them were road-tested in a wonderful session recorded with John Peel
at the end of the tour.
In its final form, The Sunset Tree,
recorded with producer John Vanderslice in Northern California towards
the end of 2004 - has emerged as the most coherent and richly rewarding
album in the Mountain Goats' wildly extensive discography. It's a
collection of songs about the house that Darnielle grew up in and the
people who lived there - an ensemble cast which includes Darnielle
himself, an ex-girlfriend, his mother, stepfather and sister, old
friends and old enemies. "I've put off writing about this stuff for
years," he says, "because I’m a little squeamish about milking my own
trauma for art, and getting good songs rather than cry-fests from these
experiences is a really excruciating process. And also because my
stepfather was still alive."
I'm in the living room watching the Watergate hearings
While my stepfather yells at my mother.
Launches a glass across the room straight at her head
And I dash upstairs to take cover;
Lean in close to my little record player on the floor:
So, this is what the volume knob's for.
I listen to dance music, dance music.
("Dance Music")
Even though he only takes the
stage in a few of the songs, Darnielle's stepfather is a baleful
presence throughout The Sunset Tree. He is asleep on the couch at the
opening of "Hast Thou Considered The Tetrapod ?", spit bubbling on his
lips, oozing menace, even unconscious. He is waiting on the driveway as
Darnielle drives home in "This Year", about to provoke "a cavalcade of
anger and fear". And it's his memory, sometimes sweet and sometimes
stinging, that mists clearly through the painkillers and wine coolers
on the album's opener, "You Or Your Memory".
But although The
Sunset Tree is a dark record, it is far from a bleak one. Crucially,
Darnielle garlands his darkest experiences with some of his sunniest
melodies. "Dance Music" is as jaunty as it is brief, skipping along
hand in hand with a playful piano part that offers an impossible
counterpoint to the unblinking honesty of the lyrics. "This Year"
borders on the anthemic, its swaying confidence in telling contrast to
the backhanded bravura of the refrain: "I’m going to make it through
this year, if it kills me." "Lion's Teeth" captures an ancient
split-second of domestic violence in a nervy, staccato march, which
renders everything that happens newly urgent and almost unbearably
vivid. "There’s no good way to end this," Darnielle deadpans.
But
he doesn’t mean it – quite…experienced as a whole rather than as a
series of terrifying, frozen moments, The Sunset Tree is a redemptive
rather than a remorseless record. The final three tracks are meditative
in tone, bittersweet rather than just bitter, and the "Pale Green
Things" of the closing song are, perhaps, the frail shoots of a
tentative new hope being born. As the liner notes say : "you are going
to make it out of there alive."
As well as John Darnielle, The
Sunset Tree features the performances of Peter Hughes (bass, backing
vocals, guitar), Franklin Bruno (piano, guitar), Erik Friedlander
(cello), Alex DeCarville (drums) and Scott Solter (keyboards).
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