The Mountain Goats - TheSunset Tree

Fri 6th May, 2005 in Music Reviews

If anyone were needing an aural representation of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From A Marriage (and if you wanna hear three hours of silent Swedes sulking at the kitchen table, you have some issues), then The Sunset Tree may be a fair place to start.

Replacing the husband and wife stand-off for a teenage son and his alcoholic, abusive stepfather, John Darnielle has created an awe-inspiring work with little more than his acoustic guitar, a few mates, and over a decade of solid indie success (by which I mean: fawning critics and minimal sales).

Forgoing much of the self-obsession and precociousness of a kid on the receiving end of such treatment – in part to the time that has elapsed since these events occurred, but more probably due to Darnielle’s hawk eye for the telling detail in a narrative – is what elevates this latest Mountain Goats album from aural catharsis to major league talent.

If the gushing opening paragraph hasn’t tipped you off already, this might: John Darnielle is one of the few true mavericks left in modern music. His voice is one of the most noxious you are likely to hear (though admittedly, in latter years he is less likely to pop veins in his forehead as he is to croon as best he can into a proper studio microphone), his guitar playing rudimentary, and his grasp of what the kids want nonexistent. Therefore, he is indispensable. He could shatter a redneck at a thousand paces with one of his carefully chosen lyrics. They’re not hallmark and they’re not poetry – they are simple observations which damage you under the clarity of daylight. If Basho were an indie folk singer with a predeliction for name checking dead figures of history in his work, then he would be John Darnielle.

It is not all hungrily strummed guitars this time round, though. Come Dilaudid it is merely Darnielle’s strained voice and cello – even if it plays out more like a hardcore riff than it does an eulogy to autumn leaves, say. It is the first time since his pre-4AD days that Darnielle has let his voice stand centre stage on its own; not since those little ditties sung over a shitty casiotone backbeat. Makes this ol’ fan almost misty-eyed to think ‘bout it all, how far he has come emotionally as well as musically – not that he would give a shit what I think. F’r chrissakes: this is the guy whose first major release (Zopilote Machine) featured a fair whack of latin quotations and song titles of the ilk of Aza Tle in Tlalticpac?.

It’s a fair call to say he was sublimating any kind of confessional singer/songwriter urges he had back then. But it is not like he is enjoying it a whole lot, you’d imagine. The fact that he had to wait till his stepfather was dead before recording this material is some kinda testimony to the tyranny it has exerted over his adult life. Hell, there’s even the sly dedication on the album: made possible by.. Being one of those abnormal children who grew up in a stable household – a little distant and detached, all the same, not too keen of displays of emotion – it is hard for me to comprehend Darnielle’s position. It could be read as payback or possibly a somewhat sour epitaph. Or maybe a celebration of his mother. Whichever way it lies emotionally for him makes good reading, but in essence it should be treated as a footnote, for The Sunset Tree is far more than a bittersweet ode to a shitkicker of a parental figure. But so prevalent is that figure, it stands in the centre of nearly every song.
 
Lion’s Teeth excels with the power of a fable and the kick of a stomping three minute pop song. A musicologist would dismiss it in moments, don’t get me wrong. But Lion’s Teeth excels because Darnielle has the knack of a writer. He does not describe it literally, though he does delve into incredible detail, and he does not have the weakness which portrays him as the victim (emo). His stepfather becomes a lion, literally, in his car. He tries – as a young teen – to pull a tooth from his mouth. Simple stuff. Possibly childish, you huff. But if the final line doesn’t slap you silent (“there’s no good way to end this, anyone can see”) then you’ve no soul. A ten word summary that others have developed into operas and entire careers, simple and devoid of adjectives and metaphors: you can’t convince me that is not genius. As the strumming of the guitar becomes more insistent you can almost visualise the pounding he is about to take.

Without doubt, however, the centrepiece of the album lasts barely two minutes. Dance Music is so powerful that it would force clergy out of their confessional booths and into the streets with axes. Writ on the page, even in italics, it’s hard to capture how it makes you stop still:
 
“I’m five years old or six, maybe, and indications that there’s something wrong with our new housetrip down the wire twice daily.
I’m in the living room watching the Watergate hearings, while my stepfather yells at my mother, launches a glass across the roomstraight at her head.
And I dash upstairs to take cover. I lean in close to my little record player on the floor: So this is what the volume knob is for!”

Aided again by the Inland Empire stalwarts of old days, Peter Hughes and Franklin Bruno, Darnielle may have just recorded his magnum opus. It may not be as dear to me as Zopilote Machine or Sweden (two of his very early works) but I am no fool and I can see what The Sunset Tree really is. For the former player he named one of his earliest releases (Songs for Peter Hughes 7). With the latter he created the group The Extra Glenns (both Hughes and Bruno once fronted almost-legendary group Nothing Painted Blue).

Of Franklin Bruno I cannot say enough – his ability with piano and a carefully chosen lyric puts even Stephen Merritt to shame (and that’s Merritt even while aping Cole Porter!). How grand a testimony then that both men have spent the better part of the past decade in service to Darnielle’s music (I was about to say muse, until I realised he would probably vomit if he ever read such a phrase in relation to his work).

To the casual listener, skimming the meat and merely catching the surface, The Sunset Tree appears to be a hymn to the American teen lifestyle. Numerous mentions of cars, girls, alcohol, kisses, road trips, music and so on. Listen carefully though and you’ll see that what you are dealing with has a pretty nasty aftertaste. It’s not so much the abusive stepfather, it’s the fact that Darnielle stands up to him and tries to match him drink for drink. There are no winners on this album – just losers by degree. Pretty grim subject matter, though given a silver lining by the way its captured on tape. No hullabaloo, no mini operates, no such-and-such in E minor. Just thirteen three-minute pop songs that make you focus on those moments in life that Kodak could never capture.

The final track, Pale Green Things seems to offer a glimpse as to how this project started. Darnielle allows himself to remember “my sister called at 3am, just last December. She told me how you’d died at last.”. He nearly always refers to the man in first tense throughout the album, making it all the more creepy to the listener. Understated bitterness never sounded so brutal as it does here. Lacking the histronics of a Lydia Lunch or a Diamanda Galas, Darnielle makes up for it tenfold with his carefully placed accents and words. He has the tenderness to recall one of the last times he has spent alone with him, those little gestures between them. And without the thunder and glee, he lets it be known that as the song fades out, there is relief at the body in the ground. He allows in the liner note dedication “may the peace which eluded you in life be yours now”. Such grace and dignity in such a remark is evidently only found somewhere around sunset.