Never News: Music

The Mountain Goats - The Sunset Tree

4AD

Smoother. That’s the word that first poped into my head after hearing this record. John Darnielle has gotten smoother, has found a more subtle approach to finding his way to making us feel dejected–and that’s what The Mountain Goats is about, often, isn’t it? This feeling of dejection and being unsteady on your own two feet.
These songs make you worry and wonder–“There’s bound to be ghost at the back of your closet/no matter where you live”–and, in doing so, they make you feel slightly more human than that almost invincible version of you that you keep at the top of your head (this version of us, we keep them locked up there for a reason–no matter how self-loathing or self-deprecating we are, this version is still well enough alive, making us do things we know are stupid).
So, clarified, these songs make you feel human. There aren’t any songs quite as driving and clashing as “No Children” (from the MG’s ‘Tallahassee’), nor are there any songs as blindly focused as that. These songs, they roll and flow out of the speakers in perfect pop-time, in perfect mix-tape measure, to make us feel that we can put this track between Bright Eyes’ ‘The Calendar Hung Itself’ and Paul Simon’s ‘Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard’ because it is the sensible bridge between two-such songs.
But lurking under that feeling of security is something brooding; maybe it’s mid-American guilt or maybe it’s post-traumatic harmony. Whatever it is, it makes you treat these songs not like perfect pop trinkets but, rather, as something secret; the album pulls you in to itself and you don’t want to be let go, you don’t want to have sing-alongs of these songs with your chums. You want these songs to yourself. Perhaps it's the terribly singular subject of the songs; the album is addressed to John Darnielle's step-dad (who, if we're to follow the lyrics, wasn't too great of a guy) and abused children the world over.

posted by Colin Reed Moon @ 2:39 PM