All Hail West Texas by The Mountain Goats

All Hail West Texas, the sixth studio album by the Mountain Goats, came out on Emperor Jones in February 2002, and it's John Darnielle alone with his boombox for the last time in a long while. After the slightly glossier The Coroner's Gambit, he went back to tape-hiss basics, recording the whole thing on his trusty Panasonic RX-FT500; no Mountain Goats album would be made that way again, or with Darnielle as the only member, until Songs for Pierre Chuvin in 2020. Right after it the band moved toward cleaner studio records with a full lineup.

The cover sells it like a short-story collection: fourteen songs about seven people, two houses, a motorcycle and a locked treatment facility for teenage boys, "The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton" among them. Merge Records reissued it on July 23, 2013, its first time on vinyl, remastered, plus seven unreleased songs written around the same time and a fresh 1,800-word essay in which Darnielle walks through how he wrote it.

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