David Andrew Strackany is an experimental folk artist who performs under the guise of Paleo. More than a poet and musician, Strackany is a road warrior, putting on more than 700 shows since 2005. The running list posted to his otherwise minimal website is awe-inspiring. His music, on the other hand, is something of a mixed bag. Its smart yet challenging, personal yet detached.

Strackany is another in a long line of folk singers who weren’t born with the suitable means to be technically proficient singers. Such a list has too many names to list, but right there at the top is Bob Dylan, owner of one of the most cringe-inducing voices in all of popular music history. But like Dylan, Strackany gets by. His words are often a shield against the sandpaper abrasiveness of his voice and his instrumentation, though off the beaten path of traditional American folk, is regularly enough a nice distraction. “Lighthouse,” the opening track on Fruit of the Spirit, is a great example of this. This cut plasters Strackany’s strained voice over top of rugged acoustic instrumentation. You can hear his fingers against the fretboard as he switches chords, even amidst the constant fluttering percussion. There are moments almost identical to this scattered all throughout the album. But as many brilliant moments as Strackany sets up and knocks down, there are that many truly agitating ones waiting just around the bend.

“Poet (Take 1)” takes some of the most brutal instrumentation you’re likely to hear all year — the clunking, rhythm-devoid instrumentation isn’t experimental, its painful — and throws it over top of ironic lyrics about the fallacies of considering yourself a poet. In a sense, this song is like hearing Strackany rebel against himself. Taken that way it doesn’t seem like such a bad creation; artists don’t often skewer their own music and mock their songwriting so freely. But taken as simply another song amongst a collection of them, it represents a turn-off of staggering proportions. Strackany’s Kristian Matsson-meets-Jackie Greene-meets cheese grater voice isn’t intolerable (all the best singers have deficiencies, anyway) but is a challenge, so it would seem logical to make things sound as appealing as possible otherwise, not take the complete opposite course. And especially not twice — “Poet (Take 2)” is essentially the same architecture recycled.

While Fruit of the Spirit does have its charms — the aforementioned “Lighthouse,” “Over the Hill and Back Again,” and “In the Movies” are all worthy standouts — they are ultimately weighted down by its shortcomings. Its clear that Strackany doesn’t have a good voice, but what remains uncertain is whether or not he’s aware of this. Throughout the album there are moments where he strains too far, stretching out to latch onto notes that he shouldn’t even be thinking about. These instances tend to hurt. And while the instrumentation backing him up may maintain a certain level of consistency (save for those two atrocious “Poet” tracks), that simply isn’t enough to make this an album worth digging too deep into.