This is a funny record. I can almost see the band getting their stuff together and heading off to the studio to record this, when one of them - probably the lead singer, "Bingo," turning around and saying, "Hey, since we're going to be recording music all day anyway, why don't we stop and grab a gigantic bag of mushrooms/LSD/can of gasoline to huff while we're there?" Because that's how this record seems to be put together: The first few tracks are pretty ordinary, folksy country-rock stuff, almost a little too much so for my tastes at times, then, all of a sudden, track seven comes along-"Ghost Woman Blues," and things start to get weird. The album goes from alt-country to old-timey blues, in a tongue-in-cheek song about a ghost. And it gets weirder, and so much better, from there. Track eight, "Salbar O Fallar," is an absolutely gorgeous cabaret-style song about love lost and death, I think, and Bingo's vocals go from sounding kind of country to absolutely, breathtakingly mournful and aching, set against a ghostly backdrop of equally mournful (and equally beautiful) horns and violins, and if the whole record was like that song, I'm not sure I could stop listening to it, ever. Then track nine ("Twinkle Twinkle") is so bizarre lyrically and musically it's hard to even really explain, like some sort of psychedelic metal music lecture given by a computer-nerd Charles Manson, while the final track, "Candelight," sounds like a musical prayer for the dead, played in minimal minor chords and almost whispered into the mic.

It's a strange collection of songs, as a whole, not because they're strange in themselves so much but because it's hard to imagine that all of this music comes from one ensemble, and even stranger to find all this on one album. – Holly Day