I finally got around to buying the Decemberists' Her Majesty. Damn, I should have bought this months ago! I like it a hell of a lot more than Picaresque. In fact, it's almost as good as Castaways and Cutouts.
I also got the Mountain Goats' We Shall All Be Healed. Also very good, also possibly underrated by a lot of people. But now I'm sad because I'm rapidly running out of Mountain Goats C.D.s to buy (having in 2005 also bought Nine Black Poppies, Zopilote Machine, Nothing for Juice, Full Force Galesburg, Sweden, The Coroner's Gambit, All Hail West Texas, Tallahassee, the Sunset Tree, Bitter Melon Farm, Protein Source of the Future . . . Now!, and Ghana.)