Although his dive into psychedelic goth folk was reportedly instigated by an overly religious upbringing in the backwater of Hammond (back when it was a backwater), Damien Youth is so not Hammond—which is, of course, the point. The darkness of his vision, first unleashed on a series of Bush I/Clinton era cassette-only releases and expanded throughout numerous side projects (the Freeks, Surprise Symphony, Kyte) is born of betrayal, the sound of someone who realizes he’s been dumped off in the wrong dimension. As such, his endless navel-gazing can become pretentious and his poesy a little florid (“You thought I hated you,” he says here, “and you were not wrong”), but he remains a fascinating composite nonetheless: a creature floating in the ether between Robyn Hitchcock’s nightmares and Nick Drake’s depression, with occasional flashes of Syd Barrett’s disturbed childhood and Ray Davies’ ragged empathy. (An unabashed Anglophile, this.)

He’s also been remarkably consistent, as you might imagine from someone almost completely untouched by the record industry, which means that Phantoms of Fables, first released in 2004, doesn’t offer any major variations in style or quality. His psychedelia may be taking a turn into noise-pop (“Red Ghost Mother”) and a Bowie-meets-Cake ballad like “Anastasia” might, with slicker production, even qualify as a post-alt hit. But that speaks more about how popular tastes have evolved: true musical mavericks, even devastatingly quiet acoustic ones like Damien, remain happily isolated, in direct contradiction to the belief system they never bought into.