The Mountain Goats – We Shall All Be Healed – 2004
John Darnielle is a fantastic storyteller. At once confessional and then, hard right turn to observational. Comfortable in 1st person, 3rd person, 2nd person, he’s what you should think of when you hear the term “Rock Poet Laureate”. He takes what Craig Finn did with Lifter Puller and The Hold Steady and, instead of exploding it, made it more reductive. I’m not qualified to determine whether or not he’s the “New Dylan”, as I’m no expert in the old Dylan.
We Shall All Be Healed is not a collected work like the preceding “Tallahassee” or the forthcoming “The Sunset Tree”. It’s a collection of songs, each one acerbic, biting, tense, the people who populate the vignettes are vivid and each track is a minor epic. WSABH is a little more accessible than Tallahassee and for that reason it’s just not as good. It’s more polished, less haunting. The knife doesn’t wield as sharply as it did on that one, and the record does veer into the uber-lo-fi of Darnielle’s earlier work (“Home Again Garden Grove”, “Quito”) but these are but quibbles as one after another the songs invite the listener into the realm of Darnielle’s story craft.
Grade: B
ASide: Slow West Vultures, Mole
BlindSide: Letter from Belgium, Your Belgian Things
DownSide: The Young Thousands, Home Again Garden Grove
