“The beauty of All Hail West Texas is the simplicity of the songs. They’re lyric-driven, and raw, and their huge amounts of emotion could not be achieved in a more complex musical setting.” These were my gut reactions when I sat down to think about this review, and I was certain that they summed up the album pretty well.
And, hey, I still agree with about half of it.
All Hail West Texas is a 2002 album by The Mountain...

When I started to think about writing this review, I made notes while the album played in the background. The first thing I wrote was, “The beauty of All Hail West Texas is the simplicity of the songs. They’re lyric-driven, and raw, and their huge amounts of emotion could not be achieved in a more complex musical setting.”
At the time, I thought that summed it up fairly well. And, hey, I still agree with about half of it.
All...

In Mawunyo’s new school, she had to stand up in each classroom and justify herself. Every “tell us a little about you” meant “you are not like us”. Every register came with repetition of her name, syllable by syllable- strip your identity back, Mawunyo, make yourself easy for us.
She fought for it: corrected pronunciation, spoke clear and slow, selected “add to dictionary” when computers told her that she was unknowable. But you can only fight for so long, and...