Decomposing Trees

The title alone does a kind of work — there's dark humor here, a willingness to sit with something uncomfortable and find it oddly beautiful. "Decomposing Trees" moves at the pace of actual decomposition, which is to say: slowly, inexorably, with a kind of patient certainty. The guitar figures are skeletal and recurring, the same phrases returning like the rotation of seasons, and the rhythm section pulses underneath with the regularity of something biological. Wareham sings with his characteristic flatness, not performing emotion so much as reporting it from a very close distance. The subject — change, decay, the transformation of living things into other living things — is handled without sentimentality, which makes it more affecting than any earnest treatment could be. There's a New England austerity to the whole enterprise, something that feels like late autumn in its textures, the palette stripped back to browns and grays and the occasional startling brightness. This is music for people who find comfort in confronting impermanence rather than avoiding it, who can sit with the fact that everything ends and discover that the sitting itself is a kind of pleasure. It's a student's song and a philosopher's song, belonging to the part of youth when ideas feel physically present.