Mountain Goats - We Shall All Be Healed
(4AD)
There's nothing more satisfying than hearing a band that's like your favorite pair of old sneakers suddenly change themselves in a way that maintains what you love about them while managing to surprise and exhilarate you at every turn. This is precisely what happens on the new album from John Darnielle and Peter Hughes. Four years ago I took it for granted that John Darnielle would continue recording on his boom box for years, continuing to write and perform fictional accounts of jilted lovers and transcontinental treks. If prizes were given for consistency in songwriting then Darnielle could compete with the best of them, having written endless numbers of songs in the keys of C and G with I-IV-V-I chord progressions. This was fine with me because I love that old pair of sneakers even if they are a little worn out and I love the Mountain Goats even if they've become somewhat predictable. However, a wrench was thrown with the release of Tallahassee and saw the Goats going through a few major changes, the most troubling of which was the decision to record the entire album in a professional studio with Tony Doogan, semi-big budget engineer for the likes of Belle & Sebastian, The Delgados, and lots of other Scotsmen. Tallahassee was an album with some great songs (and some average-to-bad songs) that were undone by production methods that were in direct contradiction with many of the most appealing and endearing Mountain Goats traits. How much more powerful could "No Children" have been if it had the same bright yet rough guitar sounds of All Hail West Texas? How much more touching would the title track of Tallahassee be if it had the gear grind and hushed singing on much of Full Force Galesburg? We Shall All Be Healed, however, brings a completely different turn of events.
Abandoning the thin acoustic guitar sound and bad vocal reverb of Tony Doogan, We Shall All Be Healed was recorded in a log cabin otherwise known as Bear Creek with John Vanderslice and Scott Solter, two of the most innovative engineers working today. Each song is recorded with full knowledge of what is needed to make a Mountain Goats record succeed and it sounds... pardon my French... Fucking Good. Special care was taken to record the acoustic guitar with the same type of distortion as he'd get on his Panasonic, only now the distortion is "hi-fi" and engineered to sound good (a process referred to by Vanderslice as "sloppy hi-fi"), a quality that doesn't have to be the result of technological and financial constraints associated with boom box recording. But amazing engineering aside, the true reason this album is possibly the best thing the Mountain Goats has ever done is the songs.
We Shall All Be Healed marks the first time the Mountain Goats have made an album without, as Darnielle put it, "any wounded party songs." Rather than create yet another album of love songs he chose to "write about drug addiction, instead," and the change seems to have revitalized and reenergized the band and eliminated any possibility of waning enthusiasm. Indeed, the songs are about drug addicts (speed freaks, for the most part), but because this is the first time Darnielle dealt almost entirely with actual events instead of simulated ones the album is possessed with a special kind of power and emotion that is absent from past efforts. Drug addiction can destroy lives, and, as we all know, misery can make for some amazing songwriting. We Shall All Be Healed is not a regretful or self-loathing affair, however, but a personal account of experiences realized in the idiosyncratic way that is pure Mountain Goats. John Darnielle hasn't bought new shoes; he's just cleaned up the old ones.
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