The Mountain Goats - We Shall All Be Healed

While perusing the Pop/Rock section at the library, I fiddled my fingers past a great multitude of generic, bland, and oldie records. Along the way I ran past Yellow House by Grizzly Bear, Made in the Dark by Hot Chip, and Sound of Silver by LCD Soundsystem. I thought how odd it was that a mere three years ago I would have thought nothing more of these gems than any of the drab fair of no-names that the lovely Mid-Continent Public Library carries. Now those wonderful diamonds in the rough are what I would consider "heavy rotation". So I decided awhile ago that while the library may carry an overwhelming amount of duds, it's stock of indie rock does occasionally wax brilliant (and, oddly, this includes my contribution of Iron & Wine's Our Endless Numbered Days that I accidentally double-stacked with Beck's Mutations). So when I ran into We Shall All Be Healed by The Mountain Goats, a band I had heard many a good thing about from friends and blogs, I thought, "OK, what the hell."

While I wouldn't go so far as to call the record a "gem", I wouldn't say that the experience of hearing it was a total loss either. There were occasional moments of bliss, but getting to these moments took a great deal of wading through generally uninspired music. The lyrics in the opening two songs are powerful, but the music itself is just bland. The next few songs show great promise, and could be something for a brilliant record to build around, but then the record just reverts back to that banal acoustic guitar chugging. It's not bad music, and a good deal of it is rather catchy, but there's just not much new or fresh about the record to keep me interested.

The lyrical content sounds to me very autobiographical, but at what point does an artist stop and ask, "Are my lyrical themes overbearing what I want to say musically?" There's a whole world of communication available through just the music, and here it appears that John Darnielle has simply chosen to ignore it in favor of his lyrics. And while this may be an okay idea in theory, you'd better be damn sure what you want to say lyrically is actually captivating.

Not that Darnielle's teenage life and times of druggie friends isn't interesting and all. It's just not enough to carry an album's length of time. Some of the rhymes also seemed kind of forced, and again, if the subject matter were just a little bit deeper, I would've felt okay with a few forced rhymes. I mean, artists besides The Mountain Goats have done great things when they focused on lyrics a little heavier than the music. Take for example Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, or mewithoutYou's Catch For Us the Foxes, in which both Jeff Mangum and Aaron Weiss prove that sometimes ideas don't really necessitate gaudy musical numbers or orchestration.

Darnielle's ideas don't necessarily need that either. What he needs is just some good old fashioned musical variety for crying out loud. I have only a basic grasp on The Mountain Goats' discography, but if I were to base an opinion of them around this album alone, I'd say that they're just your average indie band; another fold in an ever-increasing number of sub-par bands that could've been so much more. And I guess that's what I take away most from We Shall All Be Healed: the potential for something greater. Perhaps further investigation of their discography will prove fruitful, but after this experience, that may prove a little difficult for me.