If you’re going to become a fan of the Mountain Goats (i.e., a fan of singer/guitarist John Darnielle and whoever he feels like working with this week), you hopefully won’t follow the exact method I began in March of 2001: that is, you won’t start by wandering around a used CD store in a daze, hours after learning of your father’s death, and seeing the Mountain Goats’ the Coroner’s Gambit and thinking “How apt!”.

Most of the album was not in fact about death; the most strikingly bitter lines were more random ones like “I’d be grateful that our children weren’t here to see this, if you’d ever seen fit to give me children”, or “There are a lot of ways to make money in this world, but I can’t recommend insurance fraud”. But the songs that were about death had a quiet resolve, a connectedness, that I needed right then: “If you get there before me, would you save me a seat? If I never get there at all, would you leave the seat empty? This is a song for you, in case i never make it through to where you are”. I don’t really want my Dad leaving seats empty, but the thought that he might instead be able to fill them was a warm one, and I played Coroner’s Gambit a lot in those next few months.

On strictly musical grounds, I might have been happy with exactly one Mountain Goats album. It was already clear that John Darnielle mainly writes just two kinds of songs: graceful, pretty folk songs and fiercely strummed, elliptical rants. I liked both kinds immediately, as I also quickly liked his articulate, reedy, declamatory voice and the interesting turns his melodies took as they circled his words. But “Baboon” sounded enough like “Insurance Fraud #2”, and “Elijah” enough like “Onions”, that it wasn’t clear I needed dozens more examples from the rest of his (large) canon. Two other things happened to make me a true fan, though, and those, I hope, you _can_ emulate for yourself.

First, I discovered his website, Last Plane to Jakarta (at, sensibly, www.lastplanetojakarta.com ). Nominally, it’s an album-review site, and his musical taste doesn’t mean much to me … although, given the stripped-down nature of his own music, it was amusing to discover that he mainly listens to death-metal, glossy Spandau Ballet-ish pop/soul, creepy Radiohead/Interpol studio rock, and commercial rap. But the _writing_, oh man: I know nobody on the web who toys as much with his own writing style, and if you sample his Archives you’ll see what I mean. Pieces as personal as “Anniversary” and as touching as “Elliot Smith” jostle with the chattiness of “Living + Music”, the bizarrely daring pointlessness of “Six Views”, the fantasy-land humor of “Kult”, the attention deficit disorder of “Hate Them”, and the eloquent argument of “Elephant in the Room”.

His ten-part series on Radiohead’s Amnesiac is probably the single best piece of writing about a work of music that I’ve ever encountered (not to mention one of the finest uses of footnoting); and then again his writing on the band Lifter Puller is sheer fanboy enthusiasm with a bit of English major credibility drizzled on top like cake decoration, and he knows this. Darnielle clearly has no more idea what he’s going to write each week than I do, and if this is pretty much the opposite of his music writing, it nonetheless gave me reason to root for, and care about, his work. He made a couple of albums with an actual supporting band, 2002’s Tallahassee and this year’s We Shall All Be Healed, and while they mostly sound just like the Coroner’s Gambit, I welcomed the little signs of growth.

Second, then, just this past Tuesday, I saw him in concert, with his friend, producer, and fellow ace songwriter John Vanderslice as opening act. Superficially, John V. might seem an odd pairing for the guitar-strumming John D.; Vanderslice is a low-budget studio geek, his albums blessed with striking synthesizer patches and rigorous, measured percussion. But in practice they made sense together: both writers of dark-hued stories and character studies, both with distinctive reedy near-yelps and perfectly enunciated words, both writing minor-key melodies that dodge around standard patterns to find their own personal logic.

John V.’s songs, in concert, had a pounding rock edge they lack on record (I spent his set air-drumming and what we might charitably call “dancing”, always a sign that I’m having a blast), but he and his band also came onstage to offer a hurricane-force soundstorm to the Mountain Goats’ “See America Right”, and the song seemed 100% properly served. They even sold (and of course I bought) a joint campaign T-shirt, red and white on dark blue: “Darnielle/ Vanderslice 2004: for a Less Totally Fuucked America”. Who could ask for more?

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I was, in fact, going to write this as a concert review, so when I got home I went to www.themountaingoats.net to scan the lyrics and figure out which of Darnielle’s elliptical titles went with my favorite songs, the ones I’d found myself singing and swaying along to with the most energy. To my mild surprise, I realized that almost all of the songs on We Shall All Be Healed are among those favorites. You can check the Goats’ tour schedule and find a time to see them yourself, sure, if you’re lucky; but you can buy the album a lot faster, and enjoy it a lot longer, and it’s now clear to me that I’d want that for you.

As an album, it marks some clear advances for Darnielle. Musically, he and his sidemen offer more than they ever have before. “Slow West Vultures” is jittery and ominous, enhanced by rusty sawing violin, noir-soundtrack bass, broken glass, and CB radio samples. “Palmcorder Yajna”’s simple pounding drums help make it anthemic while its tinny echoed vocals help make it paranoid. The guitar on “Linda Blair was Born Innocent” is crystalline, and there’s pizzicato strings and a soft, elegant rumble to the bass, not to mention a weepy country fiddle that suits the chorus. Cheap organ and firm drums turn Darnielle’s barely-tuned shouts on “Letter from Belgium” into garage-rock. “The Young Thousands” and “Your Belgian Things” are mainly two guys strumming, but simple third-lesson piano rings out to prettify both in different ways.

Darnielle is an excellent folk guitarist on his own, mind you. All the enhancement offers enough contrast to make his slow, minimal solo piece “Mole” that much more meaningfully lonely, and the guitar echoes and muttered vocals of “All Up the Seething Coast” more worth leaning in towards the speakers to hear. “Quito” buzzes with organ and blurry feedback, cut through by a lovely violin melody; the liveliness of “the Pigs that Ran Straightaway into the Water, Triumph of” is enhanced by the quick, splashing cymbals. “Against Pollution”, best of all, is closer to the textures of the Smashing Pumpkins’ gorgeous “ 1979” than I’d’ve thought possible on a Mountain Goats budget, and circles its melody and roving bassline against the calming steadiness of its one-chord rhythm-guitar jangle and its soft snare-drum patter. We Shall All Be Healed is, indeed, the first Mountain Goats record I would recommend to someone who doesn’t give a crap about lyrics.

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Still, that someone _would_ be missing a lot of the point. Healed is also the first Mountain Goats record on which I detect a story arc, and the album title ends up capturing much of its spirit. For the first nine (of thirteen) songs that title looks preposterously ironic, to be sure, as it would on any of Darnielle’s prior albums; but “all” is an ambitious word, and the darkness is a necessary part of the task.

To me, the central fact of Darnielle’s lyrics, in all their eloquence, is their derangement. His narrators are often drunk, and the brain cells they lose leave them just as freaked when they’re sober. They’re “all dressed up, black hat and white cane, slowly circling the drain, ready for the future”, and perhaps I can endorse that as a presidential slogan, but I’m not the one “drinking the dregs” or “eating the totally inedible”. There’s a smart take on materialism, Asian labor, and dark Satanic mills somewhere in his dream of “a factory where they manufactured what I needed/ using shiny new machines/ and the headstones climbed up the hills” … but the headstones have climbed the hills for three dreams in a row, and each time it gets harder to blame them on reality. “Empty hearts on fire, hungry for love, ready to drown” is beautifully said, but it’s also a self-destructive romanticism that _makes_ its own reality.

Cut off from hope and surrounded by friends as bleak and drugged as he is, Healed’s narrator slips ever more deeply into paranoia and hallucinations. “The ghosts that haunt your building are learning how to breathe… here they come, the young thousands”. “Carpenter ants in the dresser/ flies in the screen/ it will be too late by the time we learn/ what these cryptic symbols mean”.

I can relate – I think most young idealists can relate – to “I can remember when we were in high school/ Our dreams were like fugitive warlords/ plotting triumphant returns to the city/ keeping Tec-9's tucked under the floorboards”. Still, my own imagery at the time was less violent, and if I was (and am) prone to a deluded optimism about elections, it keeps my relative grown-up taming from the vicious self-hatred of “Now we are practical men of the world/ We tether our dreams to the turf/ and cruise down these alleys for honey to feed them/ jellyfish riding the surf/ shoving our heads straight into the guts of the stove”. Maybe it’s possible to fight the system from within the system, maybe not; I’ll admire a casualty of the system before I’ll admire a too-willing cog in it, but neither do us much good.

As the album progresses, though, light starts to break through the horror-movie darkness. “Your Belgian Things” marks the end of a relationship, but tenderness can’t help sneaking into the middle of the quiet anger; “Mole” claims to want nothing more from a hospital visit than “information”, but then makes hopeful plans for her recovery. “Quito”, taking the first real risk, is the narrator’s hammy, grandiose imagining of the day he'll go sober and “make amends to everyone I’ve wounded”.

By “Cotton”, he’s identifying a place in the world for himself and making peace with it: “This song is for the soil/ that's toxic clear down to the bedrock/ where nothing of consequence can grow: Drop your seeds there … and once there was a desk/ and now it's in a storage locker somewhere/ and this song is for the stick pins and the cottons/ I left in the top drawer: Let 'em all go”. Maybe you aren’t the instinctive animist I am; maybe you didn’t almost cry at Grandaddy’s the Sophtware Slump, where the songs were eulogies for abandoned computers and rusted robots, or at Trespassers W’s elegy “Tears of the Dodo”. But if every thing deserves a purpose, loved and unpoisoned, maybe every person does too.

And maybe it’s weird to hang a vision of redemption on a year-old memory of a liquor-store mugging; and maybe it’s not perfect, in the end, to resolve a persecution complex with a jangly song of cocky bravado. But we each have our own unique histories and our own unique failings, so it’s silly to offer each of us the same atonements and blessings, as if one size would fit all. If Darnielle’s narrator can be healed, you or I should be a cinch. Even America might not be too hard.

I write this in a year when such blots on the D.C. landscape as Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey, veteran soldiers in the elevation of our current leadership, have publicly admitted that their policies have been taken Way Too Far. I write this, even, in a year when war has become unpopular for perhaps the first time in our species’ five-million-year history. I don’t know if, collectively, we _will_ stop injuring each other, or even ourselves and our own potentials, but what the hey. You can start, and I’ll start too, and let’s find out far how we go.

Recommended: Yes