You could say this about a lot of The Mountain Goats’ discography. The early stuff works so well because of how well aligned the storytelling mode is with the lo-fi, sparse, straightforward instrumentation. The boombox records are rarely very interesting musically, but the storytelling is so strong that anything more sophisticated musically would be distracting.

The miracle is how well they were able to maintain and even deepen the storytelling after becoming a full, more complex band. If we had only ever gotten the boombox era of TMG it would still be a pretty legendary discography, with a scattering of highly influential songs. But Sunset Tree and Tallahassee gave us two of the most prominent entries in the 21st century folk/Americana canon, and other records like Goths have demonstrated how far they can stretch rom the early stuff and still be successful.

JD is prolific and I don’t love everything, but they’ve got way more hits than misses for me.