The Mountain Goats: We Shall All Be Healed : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Bob Dylan proved that vitriol and acoustic guitars could go together, but the Mountain Goats' John Darnielle has taken confessional folk music to angry new depths. "I hope you die/I hope we both die," Darnielle told a fictional lover on 2002's Tallahassee; on We Shall All Be Healed, his gift for pissed-off poetry and left-field details remains intact. Darnielle gets all he can out of his speed-addled strumming and shrill voice as he complains of busted love and dredges up oddball fragments from his past. On the delicate reverie "Against Pollution," Darnielle ponders toxic soil, dysfunctional families and objects he left in a desk drawer, dedicating the song to rats who hurled themselves into the ocean. It's one thing to identify with lowlifes, but it takes real talent to make pretty folk out of rodents.

CHRISTIAN HOARD
(RS 942, February 19, 2004)