Latest Music by the Mountain Goats

John Darnielle, uber-literate songsmith who performs under the name The Mountain Goats, chronicles fear, helplessness, and gutsy attempts for the spirit to break free on his latest album, The Sunset Tree (4ad records).Present, as always, is Darnielle's horrifying ability to rare back and fire a shot straight into the heart of reality. On previous records, Darnielle's characters have been gleefully bitter ("I hope you die/I hope we both die" he bleats on "No Children," from 2002's Tallahassee); laudably introspective ("I have not learned how to forgive," "Blues In Dallas," from the same year's All Hail West Texas); and beautifully poetic ("The dandelions spread themselves thickly/out upon the fields/which are evidently endless," "Weekend in Western Illinois" on the '97 release Full Force Galesburg).  It is hard to name a living lyricist in any genre who so consistently describes things as they are, with honesty, candor, and perhaps hardest of all, precision.He has many wonderful moments on The Sunset Tree.  But these lyrics are, as Darnielle has stated in interviews, strictly autobiographical.  The album is centered on the abuse Darnielle took from his drunken step-father, who recently died.  The images are of crouching under blows, peeling away from the house with the pedal to the floor, and escaping under the healing noise of dance music.  Darnielle's phrasemanship glows in "Up the Wolves," in which he sings "Our mothers have been absent/Ever since we founded Rome." In "Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod," he vows, "One of these days/I'm gonna wriggle up on dry land."  These are epiphanic moments, quick bull's-eyes.  Equally effective is the simple chorus "I am gonna make it through this year/if it kills me" from "This Year."  Vintage Darnielle.So many of the arrows in his songwriter's quill suit Darnielle perfectly for an album that is in some ways confessional, but that primarily narrates victimhood.  Forgive a listener, though, for hearing a bit of repetition when the step-father is compared to both a lion and a magpie, and when too many images of filth and empty bottles of booze crop up. The material calls for a self-pitying approach, and the songs and lines that avoid this are probably the strongest.Musically, as on the last several outings, Darnielle has drifted beyond his early cassette-only, guitar-only approach.  Here, he inlists the help of Peter Hughes, and fleshes out some of the songs with strings.  I'm moved as much by the simplest songs, and the keyboard on "This Year" is a bit too peppy and poppy.One of the album's most contemplative (really, meditational) moments is "Song For Dennis Brown," which fits in perfectly though not about the abusive step-father (Brown being a late reggae singer).  The lyrics here are stunning.  "On the day that Dennis Brown's habits caught up with him," Darnielle gently delivers, "Children were singing in choirs/And out behind the Chinese restaurants/guys were jumping into dumpsters."  He follows with "On the day my habits catch up with me/I'll be down among the dumpsters." The song is, of course, brutally sad, but somehow very affirmative too, or at least gorgeous. And the record really is, too.