Pitchfork: New Mountain Goats Album Out in April

Okay, who told the Philadelphia City Paper, "a few [...] critics whose experience with drugs has largely been limited to listening to Lou Reed albums have enjoyed claiming that I don't sound "convincing.' If I'd've known these guys were gonna front like that, I'd've sent them postcards from jail, but hindsight is 20/20, I guess"? Oh, shit, are we still printing the headlines bigger than the articles? Guess you figured it out, then-- that's John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats, talking to a Philadelphia paper last autumn about the move from writing fictional songs to basing his work on his own life.

Last year's We Shall All Be Healed portrayed a clique of young drug users and general miscreants struggling to get their crap together; the material on the upcoming The Sunset Tree seems to cover an even earlier part of his life, a childhood that involved a lot of pop music (good) and parental abuse (bad). Darnielle went into the studio last November along with Peter Hughes, John Vanderslice, Franklin Bruno, Scott Solter, and cellist Erik Friedlander, coming out with 13 songs that are presumably a lot more life-affirming than we're making them sound. According to Darnielle, these 13:

01 You or Your Memory
02 Broom People
03 This Year
04 Dilaudid
05 Dance Music
06 Dinu Lipatti's Bones
07 Up the Wolves
08 Lion's Teeth
09 Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod?
10 Magpie
11 Song for Dennis Brown
12 Love Love Love
13 Pale Green Things

The album reportedly comes out April 26 in the U.S. and most of the world, a day earlier in the UK. This is the third Mountain Goats full-length to be released on 4AD Records, who no doubt signed the band solely to give their fellow Brits twenty-nine coveted hours of extra listening before East-Coast record stores open.

The phrase "the sunset tree" comes from an obscure 19th-century religious song, "The Tyrolese Evening Hymn"; Darnielle says he took it from a scene in Samuel Butler's semi-autobiographical novel The Way Of All Flesh, where a clergyman beats his young son bloody because of a speech impediment that prevents the son from enunciating clearly while singing the hymn. Maybe the songs aren't that life-affirming after all... If you're raring to hear these songs (and, based on the radio session the Mountain Goats did for the BBC recently, you should be), a couple live dates have been announced between now and the record's release, so hopefully you live here:

02-10 Los Angeles, CA - Echo Lounge
02-12 Seattle, WA - Crocodile Cafe