All Hail West Texas

iTunes Review

John Darnielle spent most of the past decade recording his bare acoustic songs to a trusty Panasonic boombox that he explains in the album’s liner notes behaved as a secondary instrument thanks to its constant mechanical whir. The machine slouching towards retirement makes its last stand here and Darnielle sees fit to serenade us with an album that he roughly describes on the cover as “fourteen songs about seven people, two houses, a motorcycle and a locked treatment facility for adolescent boys.” This conceptual juggernaut includes such self-descriptive song titles as “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton” and “Fall of the Star High School Running Back” where the teenaged frustrations of living in a small town lead to idle hands, bad ideas and endless road trips to any new destination. The album plays like a sociological study where the humor is in the small-time tragedies that play out amongst the mundane details that remain important in a person’s formative years.