I've never been a great fan of Lungfish - the Baltimore-based post-hardcore band that profoundly marked the artistic path by Daniel Higgs-, as a matter of fact: even if they developed some interesting ideas from the exquisitely musical viewpoint, the lyrical content of their somehow pretentious songs never made that good of an impression on me, due to my personal mistrust for an excessively "flamboyant mystical hook" (to call it so). If you know some of the past releases by Mister Higgs, the smiling man (I do like that sort of panama hat, that looks like having been crafted and coloured by some imaginary hatmaker for gnome's market!) on the cover artwork giving that vague sense of reassurance that would inspire the desire to listen his tales nearby the fireplace, you won't be wondered by the way of storytelling he explores in this release, the first part of a sermon, which doesn't look like a proper sermon in spite of some biblical allusions (besides the matching between death, love and transformation, the listener or the addressee of the sermon got named as "Lazarus" at a certain point). Likewise Lungfish's songs, I'm not impressed by this sort of little poem: the succession of verses often get closer to the wondering of a fool, more than its supposed praying. I do appreciate the limpidity of vocal recordings, but I got mostly impressed by the way the sonic entities that run together Higgs'story-telling got interlaced to the semantic relevance of some lines, including the whooshing sound matched to the quotation of a "Warholian" banana peel amidst a set of supposedly fervid and vaguely raving mystical uttering. A follow-up got already released on a more limited edition on a cassette by Jimmy Joe Roche's imprint Ultraviolet Light, featuring Stephen Strohmeier, another skilled Baltimore-based artist on a Farfisa organ, but I've not checked it yet. In spite of my opinion on such a kind of works and shamanic-like outputs, I could recommend it as an interesting essay on story-telling and sonic inoculation; that could even resemble a sort of radiophonic nuance of some visionary spelling by William Blake or ancient bards. Copies of The Fools Sermon book (the whole poem) should be available on fountainsun.com, if you are interested in checking them.