Listening to John Darnielle's lyrics, it's hard not to
imagine the Mountain Goat himself inhabiting his most
triumphant and most heartbreaking songs. There are
motels filled with early evening sunlight, slow-motion
glances from women you're in the process of running
away with, dogs rolling around playfully in the grass,
guns tenderly removed from strong hands, magnolia
blossoms, and a permeating sense of escape tempered
with a longing for home, whether that home be
stationary or temporal or human. There's adventure and
travel and romance, danger and family and fresh
vegetables. A mythical character emerges from
Darnielle's songs, crawling from in between the lines,
reaching maturity in the spaces between viciously
strummed chords, and living out its fate in the
ghostly boombox hisses that both mangle and augment
its story.
But to hear him tell it, this character has almost
nothing to do with Darnielle himself. Hard to believe,
of course, as the Mountain Goats' songs are some of
the most vividly personal of the last decade. How can
occurrences so rich with detail and characters so
deftly drawn be conjured up from some Midwesterner's
imagination? Novelists do it all the time... but it
takes keen insight and a knowledge of narrative
boundaries to put it to music and make it sound
believable. And the Mountain Goats have been doing it
for years, until now.
Darnielle is not a typical songwriter (or a typical
writer, for that matter). His influences are both
numerous and nil — there are pop-music touch points
for the kind of songs Darnielle writes, but certainly
nobody in pop music does precisely what the Mountain
Goats do. A certain amount of alchemy is necessary to
turn the same well-worn chords into so many different
songs with so many different meanings. Darnielle's musical
trajectory, until the recent addition over the last
two albums of full-band arrangements, has been a very
slightly upward-moving line. It's no surprise that
it's taken Darnielle a good 20 releases to get
around to creating a fully autobiographical work.
This album — The Sunset Tree — is enlightening and
frustrating. It finds Darnielle foraging through
personal grief and pain for something that doesn't
completely come to him at the end. The Mountain Goats'
last full-length, We Shall All Be Healed, was a
photo-book of Darnielle's third decade, cobbled
together primarily through hazy recollections and a
writer's ability to fill in missing details. On
…Healed, Darnielle treated himself like just another
character in one of his songs, a guy whose troubles
and friends and addictions straddle a line between
tragedy and farce. But on The Sunset Tree, it's
Darnielle's difficult duty to resist assigning a
weightier meaning to his main character, regardless of
whether that character deserves it or not.
Like many earlier Mountain Goats records, The Sunset
Tree plays like a photo album, with specific memories
highlighted and remembered. Most of them are bad — an
abusive stepfather, domestic violence — tempered with
good — playing "video games in a drunken haze,"
driving fast with a new girlfriend. This new
autobiographical challenge finds Darnielle stumbling
over emotions he'd normally capture perfectly in one
line, like in "Love Love Love," when Kurt Cobain's
suicide is rather clumsily invoked towards the end of
an otherwise successful song about personal sacrifice.
It's difficult for an artist to switch gears after
years of doing things one way, and though some of
Darnielle's stories feel lifted from a teenager's
diary, it's because they are, and there would be no
other way for him to appropriately present the
inherent pain and trouble of his experiences honestly.
The obvious parallel to this new method of songwriting
is Darnielle's recent acceptance of a broader musical
palette for his songs. Tallahassee and We Shall All
Be Healed both employed legitimate musicians playing
instruments in real studios, a novelty that has not
worn off, and continues to improve with each album.
Darnielle's voice — frank, unembellished, wildly
nasal, and frequently atonal — sounds better when it's
mic'ed properly, and it's allowed him to plumb
emotional depths heretofore unplumbed. Check out the
pained, stretched cry at the end of "Broom People":
"In the long tresses of your hair, I am a babbling
brooooooooooooooooook!" Or the desperate "For Christ's
sake!" that brings the cello-only "Dilaudid" to a
close. There's a parallel between the incessant
intensity of Erik Friedlander's expert cello playing
and Darnielle's almost gasping delivery of the lyrics
that shows how far Darnielle has been
able to push the Mountain Goats formula into new
territories.
The conversational tone ("All right I'm on Johnson
Avenue in San Luis Obispo and I'm five years old or
six maybe" from "Dance Music"), the proclamations
("It's gonna take you people years to recover from all
the damage!" from "Up the Wolves"), the connection
between fate and our actions — it's all here, like it
is in our copies of All Hail West Texas or
Tallahassee, but there's something else, too. I
think it's sadness — a sadness that, unlike the
melancholy in "Elijah" or "Source Decay" or any
story-song Darnielle has ever sung or screamed or
whispered, resonates in an uncomfortable way. Not
because the first-person recollections of abuse are
shocking — that's unfortunately nothing that we
haven't heard before. It's uncomfortable because it's
John Darnielle, the tight-lipped, closed-off John
Darnielle, and we're getting a glimpse of all this
stuff we've never seen before, all this stuff that
he's purposely hidden from us before, and it's new and
weird and not entirely pleasant. But ultimately the
album is bolstered by the risks he takes, and though
it trips a bit and never quite achieves the direct vision of previous efforts, it's rewarding nonetheless, for the perspective it brings to
Darnielle's body of work.
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