The Mountain Goats

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.

http://rapidshare.de/files/7149378/West_Texas.rar http://rapidshare.de/files/7149725/All_Hail.rar