hail satan!

While I was away, one of my favorite records of all time turned up on eMusic. Listening to it again right now, how can I be silent? Hear ye, hear ye: download The Mountain Goats’ All Hail West Texas right now.

I’ve freaked out about the Mountain Goats in this space before, so I’ll spare the overall hard-sell and skip straight to my endorsement of Texas. Unless my mental chronology is failing me, this is the last record John Darnielle made before taking the leap to a larger label and a bigger studio (the compilations Bitter Melon Farm and Protein Source of the Future were released around the same time). In a way, it’s fitting: everything here feels like the logical conclusion of a very particular aesthetic style, the one-man-and-tape-deck motif wrung for all its worth.

What strikes most about Texas is Darnielle’s stunning lyrical acuity. Album-opener “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton” could have been a high-concept one-off joke (and in the hands of, say, another band, it might have been). But Darnielle doesn’t just go for the easy punchline. Instead, he lets the song play out as a tragedy, the story of two outcasts in a small town whose only real family is one another. You can almost picture the kids, tallish, scrawny, long hair, faint beards, bad skin, perpetually dressed in black. Darnielle cuts to the core of the strange and beautiful camaraderie that occurs in situations like this, two gawky quiet metalheads discovering their common ground — and trying not to seem too excited while doing it. Their separation at the song’s end is devastating. It’s not just that the pair is pulled apart, it’s that they’re pulled apart by the same societal forces that drove them to each other in the first place. The song’s booming voice of authority isn’t vague and remote — it’s cruel and specific: “This was how Cyrus got sent to the school/ where they told him he’d never be famous.” The closing refrain arrives not so much as victory as a kind of sad, futile cry, hilarious and heartbreaking all at once.

The rest of the record is full of those same kinds of finely-detailed moments. The two young lovers who peel out of the driveway on a motorcycle in “Jenny” aren’t merely free, they’re “the one thing in the galaxy God didn’t have his eyes on.” Simply put, no song captures warm rush of being in love as beautifully as this one. No song, that is, except maybe “Riches and Wonders,” which outlines the delirium of monogamous love several years on, “We are strong, we are faithful/ we are guardians of a rare thing.” I’ve often said that this is the song I want played at my wedding. Because I’m all mushy like that.

What I’m trying to say is that All Hail West Texas somehow unlocks the perfect verbal expressions for all of life’s small moments. Sometimes they’re indirect, but they’re never off-the-mark. See for yourself.