Every day it seems, another folk-pop hopeful superstar, either they make it or they don't make it, but Young Husband or Noah & The Whale or David's Rusty Mountains or whatever, or even actual fucking megastars like Bon Iver, they all have the singular drawback of being really really boring and why anyone could ever even possibly begin to care is impossibly beyond me.Meanwhile, every year with the clockwork regularity that John Darnielle's now-aging bowels must be beginning to strain to reproduce, another Mountain Goats album, and is it just me but don't they always sound the same, and yet that's the strange thing because this is all the mostly-one-guy-but-also-sometimes-more (actually I think even always more but it seems like the focus is always on this one guy) folk maudlin I'll ever need, Darnielle's sad, ringing voice chiming transcendentally over the admittedly now especially dull music, but on The Sunset Tree it was possibly beautiful, or maybe I just hadn't had the soul ripped out of me then. Of course, the twist for this album is that all the songs are named after line references from the Bible, but I don't have one handy to look them up. So, what I mostly get from this is the thought that this is all somehow strangely appropriate, and that John Darnielle is probably exactly the kind of troubled, sensitive guy who maybe in times gone by would have grown up and joined the priesthood, but in this post-religious world who can really, actually believe in all that, I mean sincerely, even religious people must know their certainty is threatened (and do), so how else to respond to the loss of this one-time refuge than to grow up to become a maddeningly consistent and somehow non-crap cult folk hero?No one, of course, needs The Life Of The World To Come because it doesn't add anything remotely new or interesting to The Mountain Goats' catalogue and they have vastly better records you can buy just as easily still, but nevertheless I'd still advocate a law replacing all the other acoustic guitar-toting acts out there with just The Mountain Goats, because the results would be all the same muchness, it's just a muchness with possibly the most beautiful voice in all of music, maybe. (probably not, but, that's hyperbole for you) I'd keep some acts with acoustic guitars though, the good ones. But that's incompleteness for you.The Mountain Goats on MySpace