Let us not mythologize this band. Let us not put on gilded pedestals their dedication, their crossings of thresholds, their ventures into Cleveland and beyond. They are simple people, who love their families and work their jobs, and only annually heed the call of their dusty instruments and rusty microphones, which summon them on some Orphean descent into an underwordly region where songs must be yanked, Excalibur-like, from an unyielding boulder of thought and expression.

This band of brothers crosses into some American Hades or another and snatches tunes from the aether, making confusing little melodies that become the actual 1s and 0s or vinyl grooves which you hereby consume. Year after year, they just do their duty, which they have stupidly put upon themselves, and heed the call to play through the hate. Maybe when they are long dead, and the laughter has stopped, will their road of trials lead to their mythic birth as heroes of art and music and hope.

Here they have woven a balladic tapestry from voyages to the Deep South and the Rusting Midwest. They have fished these harmonious elixirs from under lakes and rivers, through time travel, and from the bombed out urban wastelands of the 1970s. They have tried on black wigs and pushed the black box's button.

You will change listening to this record. You will complain and grow older. You will demand a better hero, but for your money, for your effort, and for your lack of vision, this is the unholy grail with which you must return home.