Remember 'audio cassettes'? Remember the days when the pre-digital Walkman was criticized as the most isolating and therefore masturbatory form of self-entertainment since the novel? Remember snickering about needing to buy 'head cleaner'? Remembering sacramentally disemboweling the "I Love You Forever: The Supermix" tape of a partner whose behavior later revealed that they were obviously disingenuous about the loving-you-forever thing? If only I had a turtleneck for every date that ended when, after showing me her new tattoo of the Chinese symbol for 'woman' that she still hid from Dad, the girl coyly asked what was in that big black trunk at the foot of my bed-- only to learn that it was full of releases from cassette-only labels. One even sneered, "I don't even know how to use a cassette," as if they were a worse misappropriation of plastic and the means of mass production than oversized "We're #1" hands for winless football teams.

As big an oddball on the underground landscape as Stephin Merritt, Mountain Goat John Darnielle understands how to harness the majesty of the practically aborted cassette format. He appeared on nearly every cassette-only label's compilation during their golden era of Xerox-ed and Crayola-ed cover art, and released his band's first three proper albums of passionate nasal-fi straight to tape. A zillion vinyl releases and ten CDs later, and the Goats have offered the world what 'they' would have us believe is the highest-profile concept album ever recorded on a jambox, complete with grinding gears that sound like Darnielle rigged a stethoscope to the saliva glands of a retired android. And despite consistently featuring more hey's, la's and whoa's than Ringo Starr's spiral lyric notebook (hanging on the wall of the Hard Rock Cafe in Bent Musket, Georgia, if you want to check it out), Darnielle's yelled lyrics continue to pierce layers of the listener's inner ice. Foes of profane merriment beware: the chorus of "Jenny" employs a "hi-diddle-dee-dee-goddamn." Who else could, with only an abused acoustic guitar accompanying him, pull off a line as prosaic as, "We tried to fight the creeping sense of dread with temporal things"?

The songs here that aren't sagas of wayward youths chronicle the trajectories of various loves, from courtship, to feeding fruit to each other, to divorce and/or death, and sometimes even to hell. Which brings up "The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton," and its bold invocation of the Prince of Darkness: the marginalization of God cost rock one of its central components, which Darnielle resurrects with his emphatic envoy, "Hail Satan!" Though Darnielle palpably dissed Glenn Danzig in a recent issue of his zine Last Plane to Jakarta, moments like the chanting of "Hail Satan," that blend earnestness with clever condescension, provide clues to how Darnielle does his thing. He plays with tone, dipping sophistication in the muck of primitivity, sampling bits of Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, and Philip Larkin in his home-taped, sentimental wimp-rock, involving just enough brain food to prevent that Scorsese-bred part of me from suggesting, "Ayy! I got some Clorox that'll get that heart off your sleeve."

Add "The Mess Inside," with its urgent account of a love that even a September jaunt to New York can't save, to the exponentially multiplying list of songs accidentally weighted with post-boxcutter connotations of homeland insecurity (as well as the lines in "Pink and Blue" about Oklahoman wind smelling like blood and smoke). After producing dozens of songs obsessed with mobility (the "Going To ________" songs), Darnielle's last three albums have been settled in one geographic region, hinting at a fusty patience or new maturity. Would you believe that "Blues In Dallas," a Hamlet-assed song with a tinny keyboard backup and JFK underpinnings, is about something as unsexy as deciding to wait, and is also really, really good?

Darnielle's craft can convince you to follow his classist/nostalgic aesthetic logic: this album would sound perfect on the one-speaker radio atop a custodian's pushcart. You'll start asking, how can there be a sport so colonial that it requires as much cultivated land as golf does? Since so little gets reported anyway, what justifies the competing 24-hour news channels? Didn't 'analog' movie monsters at least take up three-dimensional space on the film, unlike the computer phantoms of Jurassic Park that leave actors running from thin air? Does every disc in my collection really have to be a performance test that justifies my investment in all of that stereo componentry?

At least two songs on All Hail West Texas flagrantly bemoan the state-of-the-art burden of uncurbed, soul-charring consumption. But whether you embrace the hiss and crackle or not, Darnielle seems to be, like the poets he cites, settled in his spot on the fringe.

-William Bowers, April 30th, 2002