We Shall All Be Healed has no sing-alongs. This is its biggest flaw, as far as I'm concerned. Often, the songs are very close, but there's obviously too much personal meaning in them for Mr. Darnielle; the choruses (when there are choruses) don't work on the same level as in earlier Mountain Goats. Where they used to invite you to exult with him, or to join his pain, these choruses don't. (Imagine singing along with "I am a mole." Can't do it, can you?) Mr. Darnielle probably didn't even write them with the intention of sublimating emotions; these songs are emotions. So the album's biggest flaw reveals itself to be that it's too powerful.

And yet also too subtle. All the Mountain Goats albums that I've heard are subtle, sometimes even maddeningly vague. I still can't put a story to any of them, and I would guess that's intentional. This album, although its story takes about as much form as any of them, remains outside my experience. I can guess what he means by most of the songs, they even make me feel a certain way, and yet they don't go under the skin. I still feel like I'm studying them, and they remain somewhat abstract. This is the album's second biggest flaw.

The music is great. I dont' mean the instruments, although they're more than adequate (and that organ on "Quito"--mmm, batampt). It's the vocal lines. They've got great fluid structure to fit the lyrics and the beat at the same time, great phrasing. I quite like the lyrics, too, but here, I think, is the reason for the prenominate greatest flaws. They're almost straight poems, with very little bowing to traditional song structure. They have stanzas rather than verses, and the choruses are often just two lines.

Plenty of exceptions. "Palmcorder Yanja" has a great chorus, song-like and quite fun to sing along with. "Whe-ere they-ee maaa-nu-fac-shured what I nee-ded!" Then there's "Garden Grove," and that "aa-ahh-oo," no complaints there, song as much as a poem. The aforementioned "Quito" is ear candy (that organ, woo). And the last song, again fun to sing along to.

I'm not saying that the rest is filler, I hope you'll understand. The rest also has great music, very memorable, hyper emotional. But what do you do with lines like "And once there was a deskAnd now it's in a storage locker somewhereAnd this song is for the stick pins and the cottonsI left in the top drawer"? Typical Mountain Goats, yes. Inventively fit into the song's rhythem, detailed and empathetic at the same time, sounds good when Mr. Darnielle says it, but . . . You know what, I'm wrong. That's a great line. I take back everything that sounded disatisfied.