Review: The Mountain Goats' All Hail West Texas
“It is somber but not sad, the loss finding many forms”
All Hail West Texas was originally released in 2002 on Emperor Records. Although the man behind the Mountain Goats, John Darnielle, didn't know it at the time, this album would be the last of the “home recordings” that signified his career until then. The band went on to release studio albums with 4AD and Merge Records, the latter of which reissued All Hail West Texas on vinyl in July, 2013. Nailed Magazine contributing editor Roy Coughlin took the opportunity to revisit one of his favorite albums.
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The Mountain Goats' “Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton” is playing and I'm crying a little. It's a common enough occurrence when I listen to this song. Anyone who's ever felt outside in any significant way understands it, specifics aside. There's something so brutally casual about a line like, “When you punish a person for dreaming his dream / don't expect him to thank or forgive you.” Too many people we're meant to trust will crush us given half a chance. But it's a triumphant song, not sad, and a perfect lead into the album that follows.
It has been 11 years since I first picked up the original CD of All Hail West Texas. I have little idea what I thought then; most guesses would be revision. I think it probably grew on me, like the earlier works of John Darnielle had. On first blush it is as strange and sonically ragged a collection of songs as the Mountain Goats releases that preceded it, the melodies declared more than sung, the acoustic guitar percussive, everything sibilant, the language climbing out of the speakers. I know I'd never heard anyone use words in quite the way Darnielle does. I didn't get half of it, I'm sure. I'm still parsing today. But in the years since, I've felt more than I can explain with each successive listen.
Holding the jacket of the vinyl reissue in my hands while the record spins, I feel closer to these characters than I did a decade ago; the thread of loss running through the album makes more sense to me—empathy replaces sympathy. It is somber but not sad, the loss finding many forms, some more akin to shedding: the narrator in “Jenny” exchanges a static life for a future that extends as far as the eye can see from the speeding motorcycle and the woman piloting it, “Riches and Wonders” traces the loss of self to love, and the broken and buried person who goes through a reemergence in “Absolute Lithops Effect.”
As in so many of the early Mountain Goats albums, there are of course contentious relationships detailed, but unlike many of those other characters, the couples here seem less intent on mutual destruction, less resigned to their fate. Mostly, there are just a lot of people who've made mistakes, all of them deserving of some small measure of redemption, some actually finding it. Even the doomed teens of the opener—dreams quashed, friendship splintered—are given an improbable future by Darnielle: “The best ever death metal band out of Denton / will in time both out-pace and out-live you.”
The bonus tracks that accompany the reissue are neat but irrelevant. They clearly belong to an earlier or later version of the band, and their inclusion here mostly serves to highlight just what a pivotal moment this album turned out to be in Darnielle's songwriting. Yeah, it's a boombox recording (and if you're not sick to death of reading about that format in every single review ever written about the Mountain Goats, you're inhuman), but in some ways All Hail West Texas marks the beginning of the next stage of the Mountain Goats, not the end of the previous. The melodies are stronger, the delivery generally more patient, the empathy for his characters more personal. Darnielle returns to the rudimentary tools that had always shaped his work, but it doesn't seem rote or nostalgic; instead, it feels like a small step back in order to one last time control the medium as directly as possible, and bury the lie that the form is limiting. Even as he sings of boneheaded people chasing their dreams and demons despite all odds everywhere against their success, sings into the primitive machine that framed or caged his art for so many years, he has already succeeded.
By the time All Hail West Texas was released, John Darnielle had already taken the next step. A big-label album came shortly after, a collection of songs more nuanced and lush, with fleshed out instrumentation and the strongest songwriting of his career to that point. For many fans, that follow-up is the line of demarcation, the point when the Mountain Goats went completely wrong or terribly right. But for me, All Hail West Texas is the real moment when Darnielle took hold of his art for good. It is a restorative breath at the end of something and the beginning of everything. “After one blind season alone in here / after one long sweltering summer / I'm going to find the exit.”
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