Pale Green Things

So I'm assuming you aren't a complete moron and have, therefore, picked up the Mountain Goats' latest effort. If, however, you suffer the unfortunate affliction of being a complete moron, it was released on 4AD last April and it's called The Sunset Tree. They've already recorded a new one to be released this fall, so if you haven't heard The Sunset Tree, you're way behind. I forgive you, though, because the band has released about 400 songs. At any rate, if it's a simple matter of not knowing where to begin, begin with The Sunset Tree. And I will now tell you why.

First of all, the album is a brilliant thematic rumination upon the power of music, and I know how terrible that sort of thing might sound. The Mountain Goats don't care, though. They have a mission. And that mission is to look honestly and thoughtfully at what might otherwise become a relationship painted with broad, assuming strokes. To be less vague, the album is about a young man's relationship with his abusive stepfather, and the role music plays in quelling—or, at least, constructively funneling—the depression and despair of the situation. This is no Golden Boy¹. This is no Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton²

The stepfather is portrayed at turns as a vicious monster (“I start wailing. The lion roars.”) and a misunderstood person with deep and troubling problems (“love, love is going to lead you by the hand into a white and soundless place”). We get a distinct sense of the pain our child-protagonist is going through when he explains how his stepfather “launches a glass across the room, straight at [my mother's] face, and I dash upstairs to take cover; lean in close to my little record player on the floor. So this is what the volume knob is for, I listen to dance music.”

And even this small fortress in which young John took cover is not safe from the terror: “You blaze down the hall and you scream. I'm in my room with the headphones on, deep in a dream chamber. And then I'm awake and I'm guarding my face, hoping you don't break my stereo, because it's the one thing that I couldn't live without and so I think about that and I sort of pass out.”

But when the dust finally settles, and John finally “wriggles up on dry land,” he looks back with a mixed sense of anger and finality. I get the feeling he wants to forgive or, at the very least, reconstruct his memories in a manner in which forgiveness is a plausible option. This intangible desire for his stepfather's posthumous redemption duels with his own desire to rid himself of the emotional tyranny within which he has shrouded his life, never more clearly than in the final song, Pale Green Things.

There are four pale green things in this song to take note of. First are blades of grass trying desperately to survive through the cracks of concrete. This subtly parallels John's own struggle to thrive under his stepfather's oppression. But also, and even more subtly, the desire for forgiveness to thrive under the emotional trauma that had been surmounting his whole life. Second, the wet leaves that his stepfather listlessly stared at during a particularly vivid memory. The wet leaves become synecdoche for the far off distance in which things might become okay again. The third pale green thing is the ruminations of “seaweed and Indiana sawgrass” John evokes upon hearing of his stepfather's death. This becomes the process of analyzing information; the “turning it over in my mind” necessary for sincere contemplation of some of the most emotionally fragile aspects of this young man's psyche.

The CD itself is the fourth pale green thing. It's completely green with a black border. Nothing more. Not even the name of the album. It is perhaps John's way of closing the process, finding finality in the place he has sought it his whole life: through music. His own music becomes, as those other striking metaphors, an avenue for solace and redemption, a place to express, however simply, his pale green things.

1An early Mountain Goats song extolling the virtues of kindness and charity on the grounds that “there are no Pan Asian supermarkets down in hell, so you can't buy Golden Boy Peanuts.”

2A somewhat more recent parable of high school would-be rockers whose dreams are crushed by adults who don't “get” the nuanced protocol of the death metal genre and, being adults, assume the worst.