The Sunset Tree by the Mountain Goats is an album that demands and holds your attention. I’ve listened to it twice so far and both times I tried to multitask, as I always do, Google Reader and various blogs open simultaneously. But my eyes kept unfocusing, I kept losing my train of thought, I was compelled to only listen. This doesn’t happen often.
In some ways, The Sunset Tree is the ultimate refutation, if there ever needed to be one, that pop music can’t work on the level as some of the great works in the classical music literature. Of course the two shouldn’t be compared, they work differently, but as someone weaned on the Beethoven quartets and Bach partitas I’ve always wondered: is it possible for a pop album to hold together as well as a cohesive symphony, like Beethoven’s 9th? Is it possible for a pop album to become more than a collection of great songs, no matter how great the songs are?
A favourite pop album of mine is Joni Mitchell’s Blue, which I love endlessly. Yet it doesn’t quite make its way past being a collection. There are threads that run through it, yes, there are some tenuous connections from beginning to end, but it’s no op. 131, certainly.
The Sunset Tree may not have as many great songs as Blue, but there is something compelling that runs through them. They breathe together. No song feels “added” to the mix. They are all highly narrative. When you get to “Pale Green Things” at the end, you feel like you have come a long way … and also that you can put on “You or Your Memory” again and start all over.
This isn’t a review, because I don’t know the album nearly well enough yet. I need to study the lyrics and listen several dozen more times. Not that pop music needs to be like classical music, but here is another way The Sunset Tree acts like great classical music - it resists meaning, it yields its secrets slowly, it requires a relationship with you rather than a one-listen stand.
