AM is good; Ghost isn't.
The debut is knocked a lot—and I can understand, as it's basically an Uncle Tupelo album with no Jay Farrar songs, but it's a solid set of country rock, regardless. The production on AGIB does that album in: unfeeling, inert, soulless. Even the band themselves perform in a cold, calculating fashion; luckily, these songs fared much better live, with the band giving a much needed looseness to the material.
I like AM a lot. I'm bummed that they basically have disowned it, there are some choice cuts on there like "Just that Simple" and "Box Full of Letters" but I really dig Ghost. "Spiders" alone is worth the price of admission.