The Mountain Goats
All Hail West Texas
Emperor Jones

Solitary singers wielding acoustic guitars are the musical equivalent of a glass of water. It's a means of expression that boasts more than its share of boring, flavorless, transparent hacks, and while there's bound to be the occasional draught of earthy, lukewarm sludge, it's hard to get passionate about disliking all but the most inane troubadour. Every now and then, however, a refreshing wellspring of talent emerges, like a Bob Dylan or a Woody Guthrie.

While John Darnielle, aka The Mountain Goats, occupies a plane somewhat below Dylan and Guthrie's, his recent concept album, All Hail West Texas, is a low-tech, long-on-intellect remedy for overproduced, dumbed-down sugar pop as well as intricately arranged, multi-instrumental art-rock. Sometimes a glass of water is all that will do.

Described by its album cover as "fourteen songs about seven people, two houses, a motorcycle, and a locked treatment facility for adolescent boys," All Hail West Texas sticks to the Goats' recent formula: The whole thing's recorded on a boombox so rundown its gears grind audibly in the background, harmlessly marking time the way the yellow dotted line on the highway gives the impression of distance traveled without destroying the view.

As for the music accompanying the gears, West Texas keeps it simple. With the exception of "Blues in Dallas," which features a drum machine and a cheap keyboard, the instrumentation is acoustic guitar and voice. Darnielle will never be mistaken for a guitar god, though his playing is competent enough. The same can be said for his nasal, off-kilter singing.

Not surprisingly, the emphasis of Darnielle's music is on what he's singing, not how it's delivered. And All Hail West Texas teems with rich, intelligent lyricism. The album's seemingly unrelated characters have little in common other than geography, yet the album possesses an American everymanism that makes them easy to relate to. Everyone knows teenagers like those in "The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton," who "never settled on a name/ But the top three contenders/ after weeks of debate/ were Satan's Fingers/ The Killers/ and The Hospital Bombers."

Even the tried-and-true use of a crumbling physical structure as a metaphor for emotional unraveling is employed to brilliant effect in "Fault Lines:" "It's gone on like this/ for three years I guess/ and we're drunk all the time/and our lives are a mess/ And the deathless love we swore to protect with our bodies/ is stumbling across its bleak ending/ But none of the rage in our eyes/ seems to finish it off where it lies/ I've got sugar in the fuel lines/ Both of us do."

Like a talented poet or prose writer, Darnielle uses vivid, situation-specific lyrics to speak to universal American experiences. Not everyone will be familiar with "Source Decay's" "drive two hours east to check the Austin post office box." But anyone who's driven through, grown up in or done time in rural America can appreciate the next stanza's brilliantly rhymed "all the Chevy Impalas in their front yards up on blocks." When Darnielle hits his stride, as he does on 10 or 11 of All Hail West Texas' 14 songs, he wields the power to produce laughter in his listeners' throats, or tears in their eyes.

— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)