Since releasing his first
cassette in 1991, John Darnielle, a singer/songwriter who records as the
Mountain Goats, has authored more than 400 songs, most of which are better
than any number of songs you’re likely to hear. Don’t beat
yourself up for overlooking his brilliance, though. For more than a decade,
Darnielle hid his light under the requisite indie-rock bushel, yelping into
boom boxes, fetishizing tape hiss, and cultivating a small but insanely
devoted following of fellow freaks. (He also inadvertently made the world
safe for Conor Oberst, but we won’t hold that against him.) However,
beginning with 2002’s Tallahassee, his first outing for the UK-based 4AD label, Darnielle has
been moving away from this defiantly lo-fi aesthetic toward something that,
if not exactly Clear Channel-friendly, involves recording at actual studios
with actual musicians and actual engineers; whether this concession will
endear him to mainstream music fans remains to be seen, but it certainly
removes the biggest obstacle.
The Sunset Tree, the
follow-up to last year’s excellent We
Shall All Be Healed, also marks the continuation
of his recent autobiographical leanings. Although Darnielle once disdained
the reductive narcissism of confessional singer/songwriters — those
embarrassingly earnest soul-barers for whom the first-person pronoun is an
end in itself — he has come to embrace the creative possibilities in
his own life story. The Sunset Tree is dedicated both to Darnielle’s late stepfather
and to survivors of abuse, a connection that becomes uncomfortably obvious
as the song cycle unfolds. If the prospect of 13 songs about suffering at
the hands of a sadistic patriarch fills you with dread, you’re not
alone: Child abuse, after all, is not only depressing but also depressingly
commonplace. Every victim’s pain is special and important and
pitiable, but no one, unfortunately, wants to hear about it.
Luckily, Darnielle is a genius, and geniuses always
find a way to make us listen. In language that is plain, idiomatic, and
unafraid of the occasional heartfelt cliché, he marshals a wealth of
specific detail to impart universal truths. Rather than condemn his
tormentor and wallow in self-pity, he creates a meticulously nuanced
context in which his individual suffering is a metaphor for the human
condition and a touchstone for his artistic development. The wryly titled
“Dance Music” pairs Darnielle’s plangent bleat with a
cheerful Charlie Brown-ish piano to demonstrate the redemptive power of
music: “I’m in the living room watching the Watergate
hearings/while my stepfather yells at my mother, launches a glass straight
at her head/and I dash upstairs to take cover, leaning close to my little
record player on the floor/So this is what the volume knob’s
for.” On “Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod,” a teenage
Darnielle accidentally awakens his stepfather and faces the consequences:
“And then I’m awake and I’m guarding my face, hoping you
don’t break my stereo/Because it’s the one thing that I
couldn’t live without/And so I think about that, and then I sort of
black out.”
The 13 songs follow a nonlinear but emotionally
accurate trajectory, depicting the narrator’s movement from fear and
rage to various forms of escapism and, finally, in the gorgeous closing
diptych, to a kind of forgiveness. On the delicate “Love Love
Love,” Darnielle somehow ties together Raskolnikov, Kurt Cobain, and
the New Testament, distilling all of the allusions into a message
that’s both perfectly obvious and unassailably true: “Some
things you’ll do for money, some you’ll do for fun/But the
things you do for love are going to come back to you one by one.”
Despite its horrific subject matter, The Sunset
Tree is an act of love. Let’s hope it
comes back to him.
This article appears in May 5-11, 2005.
