Review Summary: I'd like to tell you a story.
Some 130 terrestrial years following the scientifically-dated Great Flood of Noah, all of the world did speak exactly the same language. Their shared tongue had a name, and that name was Folk. With this language, the people were able to communicate base emotions such as joy and pain, and lo, it was good. And the people did find ways to convey their emotions. Many a time, they would join together in chorus to evoke feelings of awe and inspiration from their unity, or express themselves more frantically in order to reveal passion and excitement. It was a good world in which to live, a simple society for undeveloped minds that had not known the wrath of the lord.
They fucked it up by trying to reach heaven with a huge tower, and lo, did the language of Folk diversify as punishment for their foolishness. There developed more sophisticated versions of the once-primitive language; the borrowing of words from Punk made the hybrid language Folk-Punk, and the discovery of new ores brought about Folk-Metal. The original tongue persisted, but also became more elegant and more elaborate; Folk's dictionaries now contained new structures, ideas and sounds as a result of simultaneous refinement and expansion. But it was presumed an elite language because of its lack of mono-syllabic words and apparently random interjections, and so it became uncool.
In the two-thousand-and-ninth year after Christ, though, all of this did change. For he did return, in the guise of a four-piece folk band from West London. Choosing to shirk his old stomping ground of the Middle East for reasons of impartiality, he began to spread his gospel. He hoped that his use of the outdated banjo would hint at his true identity. Seeing that the people of the world were confused with all manner of interesting song structures and instrumental complexity and emotional realism, he sought to bring peace to all mankind by fixing the damage done those thousands of years ago. In his now-famous Sermon In The Pub, he declared that the new language would be the Folk of old, the simple, traditional language of pre-Babel civilisation.
There was but one tiny snag. As he begun to preach his messages of love and loyalty and torment, he found them to be full of the most basic platitudes. As he induced the group vocal, it was so loud that it could not be heard. As he sped up his banjo strumming - and Jesus is a pretty mean banjo player, you guys - he played so fast it just became one long note. On the first day, he created the quiet song. On the second day, he used that song's rib to create the foundations for the song with the epic climax. And on the third day, he made an album in those songs' image. And lo, Jesus - disguised as Mumford & Sons - did release that collection of songs, and he realised that creating a piece of art based on hollow attempts to reconstruct the shallowest tenets of something which is in fact quite elegant, is really not the way to communicate with people at all.
So he went back into hiding for a while until he thought of something worth fucking saying.
