The Mountain Goats Album: “We Should All Be Healed”

The debate that I've heard often about this album is whether the slick production values take away from the Mountain Goats feel. If you're unfamiliar with John Darnielle's previous albums, one of the big draws was that he recorded directly to a boom box. I don't believe that this retro recording style was what really made his work great. The man is simply a great songwriter, in the vain of such great Americana-ists as Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen. To that end, "We Shall All Be Healed" definitely stands tall and proud with his other works. A few legends surround the method by which Darnielle develops the stories for his albums. However he does it, the albums come together as cohesive observations of different walks of life across the country, and this album is no exception. The story here is occassionally unclear to me, as it sometimes seems to switch narrators, but the songs are beautiful and emotional. By the end of it, you'll care deeply for these charaters, thanks to both the lyrical precision and the haunting melodies.

I've loved the Mountain Goats ever since Atom and His Package covered three songs. The songs were so honest and funny I had to seek out their source. The first Mountain Goats album I laid hands on was Full Force Galesburg, and it was a shock. Atom and His Package was electronic and frantic. The Mountain Goats was almost exclusively one man with an accoustic guitar performing songs that were still honest and funny, but also haunting and raw. His songs were recorded on poor equipment--you could actually hear the drone of the tape recorder's motor in the quieter moments of the album. The lack of polish and pretention gave the songs greater emotional impact for me, and I became an instant fan, buying up every MG recording I could find.

My first reaction to "We Shall All Be Healed" was mostly negative. The songs are professionally produced and expertly engineered. The guitar is accompanied by organs and piano and synth effects like glass breaking and insects chirping. It almost sounded like a different band.

Fortunately, I stuck with it and now I'm hooked. The cleaner, more professional sound actually makes for a terrific backdrop for the lyrics, which are still as powerful as ever. The ugliness of addiction, death, and betrayal found in the lyrics float on the beautiful music that makes the truths in the words harsher and starker. It took a little while to grow on me, but I now think this is the best MG album yet. I'm using songs from this album to spread the Mountain Goats gospel. Check it out.

This is the first album by the Mountain Goats, where it was written mainly about himself, about John's past.

John used to have a major addiction to meth and these songs are so beautifully written in a form where they are never judgmental, but purely observational to a time in his life that was hard, not only for him, but hard on friends and loved ones that he had to watch decay as well.

We Are The Young Thousands is one of the battle cries that comes forward, as well as a repetition of the line "and the headstones climbed up the hill" during "Palmcorder Yajna", which turns out to be one of the most wonderfully written songs ever.

If you are a fan of tMG's, this is a must memorize album. If you are a fan of folk rock, another must have, but if you are just starting out with tMG's, I would suggest another album or two before this one.

Some of the richest metaphors ever found in song...they'll creep out of the music and into your mind ever so slowly over the course of many listens, all their angles and breadth.

The production is a perfect compliment to the songs, not at all a sell-out for the MG's, but tasteful, minimalistic fleshing-out of the tunes, that can hopefully make the MG's sound just that much more accessible, maybe Mr. MG himself can quit the day job, should he want to.

Among other things, this album is Darnielle's love letter to the first-person plural pronoun. Anyone over 25 ought to understand the tragic loss involved. There're a couple of clunkers here, but overall it's a wonderful journey back.