's only release provides a nice showcase of the kind of spare and blunt material he excels at and contains plenty of his own brand of preaching. With his minimal guitar/piano accompaniment and childlike vocals, sounds at once bleak and innocent on nouveau church hymns like and He switches gears for some fire and brimstone, though, on the impassioned and painfully comic (one of three live numbers recorded at ). gets some help from 's on the rousing, minor-key number and teams up with for the touching lament The mood lightens a bit with a cover of ' but with 's gothic and chunky piano chords threatening to derail the song, the respite is brief. 's battle with manic depression is well known and is made painfully explicit here when successive live cuts find him in tears at one moment ( ) and leading a singalong in the next ( ). In spite of the rough going, this release is still worth getting; It's certainly a must for his fans and not a bad purchase for the newcomer either. [The 2008 remastered reissue adds five bonus demos, including a piano-led version of .] ~ Stephen Cook