Oh me, oh my, The Sunset Tree has thrown me into a mini-crisis. That might seem like a big statement for such a small record, but rewind a decade: That’s me, there, in a “Welcome to the Inland Empire” silk-screened Shrimper tee, unwashed hair, and horn-rimmed glasses, obsessing over the Mountain Goats’ The Hound Chronicles cassette while stacking loaves of bread at a Southern New Jersey convenience store. Every night I’d steal a Snapple and drive home through the pines and deer alleys in my broken Chevy Impala with the windows down, blasting the Mountain Goats, Paste, Nothing Painted Blue (or whatever), on my tiny portable boom box.
That teenage idealism followed me to college, too, when I gave the by-then hard-to-find Hot Garden Stomp cassette to a friend because he carried a picture of John Darnielle in his wallet—I felt he deserved it. For years, the Mountain Goats’ Sweden was my main signifier for that country. Whenever I saw the Swedish flag, I’d hum “The Recognition Scene.” But as 2000 rolled around, I’d forgotten Darnielle existed. (Actually, in a way I thought he’d transformed himself into Rick Moody, or they were somehow a ghost-writing tag team.)
My general loss of interest isn’t meant to dismiss or simplify Darnielle’s accomplishments. It’s just that after memorizing the shivers induced by “the most remarkable thing about you standing in the doorway is that it’s you and that you are standing in the doorway” perhaps I’ve already experienced the apex of Darnielle’s poetics at my own personal ideal time/place. I no longer even own a car or a boom box and I rarely steal iced tea from the local bodega.
And no, I’m not a low-fi purist, so it doesn’t at all bother me that he’s upped the production. In fact, the accompaniment of Peter Hughes, John Vanderslice, Franklin Bruno, Scott Solter, and Maldoror fan Erik Friedlander open things up here (as on his last few records), allowing Darnielle more space to take some breaths, work on atmosphere, introduce catchy piano trills, some distorted grinding noises, and cello swells.
But yet my first few listens to The Sunset Tree, the Mountain Goats’ third 4AD full-length and follow-up to last year’s We Shall All Be Healed, left me cold, even though Darnielle axes his fictions and explores his own personal life, specifically an abusive stepfather.
As one would hope from a songwriter as smart as Darnielle, “The Sunset Tree” comes from a 19th-century religious song, “The Tyrolese Evening Hymn,” and, as reported in Pitchfork news some time ago, “Darnielle says he took it from a scene in Samuel Butler’s semi-autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh, where a clergyman beats his young son bloody because of a speech impediment that prevents the son from enunciating clearly while singing the hymn.” Still, even as said stepdad chucks a glass at mom’s head and young JD runs up into his room to hide the shouts with dance music, the familiar staccato of those comforting cadences lulled instead of enlightened.
Something I subconsciously learned when I was younger that I’m just now understanding is that the Mountain Goats sound best after obsessively replaying each track until they become as familiar as your own personal memories. Accordingly, after a thousand and one listens, while I can still do without much of the second half of The Sunset Tree, on its first four songs Darnielle locates a stride, crafting a perfect four-part diorama. It's quite an accomplishment.
Opener “You or Your Memory” is a lonely motel-room, bare-foot epiphany fueled by St. Joseph’s baby aspirin, Bartles & Jaymes, and a mirror. “Broom People” develops the domestic scenery for the album’s drama: ’36 Hudson in the garage, junk in an unattached spare room, “white carpet thick with cat hair,” dirty dishes, lots of ice cream in the freezer, “friends who don’t have a clue/Well-meaning teachers,” suicide notes in a spiral-ring notebook, and the girl who makes him feel alive: “In the long tresses of your hair I am a babbling brook.”
With a fast-car thematic that’s an odd collision between Tracy Chapman’s urgency and the romanticism of Jawbreaker’s “Chesterfield King”—and brandishing the triumphant chorus, “I’m gonna make it through this year if it kills me”—“This Year” finds 17-year-old Darnielle breaking free from his “broken house” on a Saturday morning to play video games “in a drunk haze” while holding hands with a girl named Kathy. Of course, teenage celebrations come to an end: “I drove home in the California dusk/I could feel the alcohol inside of me hum/Pictured the look on my stepfather’s face/Ready for the bad things to come.”
Then there’s the wonderful “Dilaudid,” a coil of nervous energy and teenage thrill-seeking. Darnielle’s backed by a full-on string crew and the bows are used in a quick/jaunty way, matching the machine-gun rate of hi claustrophobic and creepy salvos (i.e., teen horniness fueled by pain killers): “Hike up your fishnets, I know you. If we live to see the other side of this, I will remember your kiss, so do it with your mouth open. And take your foot off of the brake, for Christ’s sake.”
After that, besides a cleaning-out-my-closet sing-a-long “Up the Wolves,” The Sunset Tree loses steam. The late-period references to Kurt Cobain’s suicide feel cheap and easy. Pieces of it go by unnoticed. Bits either blend into one another or wander. Oddly, at times it seems like Darnielle works more movingly and astutely when he’s inventing his tales rather than partaking in personal anecdote and/or trauma. Then again, invention often possesses a more beautiful narrative arc than retreating to your bedroom to block out a parental argument. Really, though that first quartet is a wonderful example of what Darnielle can do when he’s on—draw characters and plot better than just about anyone holding a guitar.
