My Morning Jacket, The Waterfall - album review: Whirlpools of analogy and swirling guitars

Prolific frontman Jim James returns to My Morning Jacket with his soul refreshed and ready for another tilt at the cosmic windmill

My Morning Jacket

Having indulged his crypto-religious ruminations in 2013's solo opus magnum Regions of Light and Sound of God, prolific frontman Jim James returns to My Morning Jacket with his soul refreshed and ready for another tilt at the cosmic windmill.

Always prey to their psychedelic tendencies, here MMJ swallow the full tab and dive headfirst into a whirlpool of supposition, analogy and swirling guitars, pursuing "the answer [which] floats on down the farthest shore of the mind", as James puts it in the opener "Believe (Nobody Knows)". The song's claim that "nobody knows for sure" is rather undermined, however, by the stadium-sized self-belief of the arrangement, in which Garcia-esque guitar tendrils are bound to anthemic posturing on a Coldplay scale.

James's soulful falsetto vocals lend an ethereal tone to the spiritual musings of "Compound Fracture" and "Like a River": in the one hankering for a world where "there's no evil, there's no good, just people doing as they should", whilst, over gently juddering keyboard and eerily shivering string-synth, the other pursues its liquid metaphor for life through to a climactic wordless keening which evokes the tumble of a waterfall, neatly setting the scene for the ensuing "In Its Infancy (The Waterfall)". Another smoke-wreathed reflection on the wheel of life, swathed in vibes and fizzing portamento synth, it's rather sabotaged by its own ambition, with too stilted shifts between its various sections.

The title "Big Decisions" suggests yet more philosophical speculation, but it turns out to be one side of a domestic dispute, with terse, chunky chording underscoring the protagonist's growing disaffection with always having to make the decisions and be Mr Nice Guy. It's perhaps the prequel to "Get The Point", which rakes regretfully over a collapsed romance, acoustic guitar and pedal steel treading lightly on spurned affections.