Preacher's Daughter

I've had this recommended to me so much in the last few months but I've only just gotten around to it and yeah, it more than lives up to the hype. I've known American Teenager for a while, and have listened to it, for lack of a better word, religiously since it first graced my ears, but finding out that the rest of the album is of very similar quality was amazing to experience too. Paradoxically it feels both very meaty and very skeletal to me, like a ghost story where not much happens narratively but where the vivid descriptions really knock it out of the park. There are definitely haunting narratives full of substance here, don't get me wrong - sometimes it even comes close to feeling as densely epic in its solemn exploration of the American Gothic as Springsteen's Nebraska, whose title a song here coincidentally partly shares - but though this is a concept album, and is full of wonderful moments of songwriting, it relies much more on atmosphere than anything else to fully get that across. Like I said, it's both meaty and skeletal, and is probably better for it, riding the line wonderfully instead of fully committing to either side and losing half of itself as a result.