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The Mountain GoatsWe Shall All Be Healed 4AD/Remote Control/Shock John Darnielle has been making records as The Mountain Goats since the early 'nineties - 70-odd of them, in fact, many of which were recorded straight into a home tape recorder (cf: 2002’s mighty ‘All Hail West Texas’) - and I had no idea he even existed until he blew me away with the most spirited solo performance I’ve ever seen at the Grace Emily during his low-key tour last year. I wasn’t the only one whose life was changed that night: the second he finished playing my beautiful wife ran home, grabbed our rent money, sprinted back and bought a copy of every CD he had on offer. ‘Tallahassee’ was, hands down, the best thing I heard in 2003. Hence you can understand that my expectations for ‘We Shall All Be Healed’ were pretty damn high. Early word was that it was the most band-ish record Darnielle has yet made, borne out by insanely catchy lead single Palmcorder Yajna ("Carpenter ants in the dresser / Flies in the screen / It will be too late by the time we learn / What these cryptic symbols mean." Genius), and it’s certainly the most lush album he’s done so far. That said, lush by Goat standards sounds obsessively sparse by anyone else’s, and Home Again Garden Grove should placate older fans with its strident-voice-and-guitar-into-a-cheap-condenser-mic immediacy. The opening Slow West Vultures staggers along like a angry man after a beating, Linda Blair Was Born Innocent is one of the best titles in recent memory, Quito is driven by a distorted bass, Mole is a strangely jazzy in its low-key approach, and The Young Thousands starts off as an acoustic marching song, mixing quirky beauty and casual violence (Darnielle ryhmes "And the sunlight on the water / Sets a switch off in your brain" with "And there’s someone waiting outside in the alley / With a chain"). Darnielle is also lucky that he wrote First Few Desperate Hours, since he rips it off to an almost litigious degree in the closing Pigs That Ran Straightaway Into The Water, Triumph Of. Alright, for my money it doesn’t quite reach the heights of ‘Tallahassee’ (but what record does?) and you can almost hear the nasal whines of "sell out!" as US underground critics and internet message boards bitch about Darnielle’s use of such mainstream concepts as "studios" and "producers," but for everyone else ‘We Shall All Be Healed’ is a low-key, unpretentious masterpiece. |
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