Universal Hall

With the right honourable Steve Wickham reintegrated into a line-up that spent the last couple of years touring, one might be forgiven for thinking The Waterboys would steam back with a rip-snorting astral blast of a record that bears out their reputation as a live band of no small repute.

One might be required to think again.

For their ninth album, Mike Scott and fellows instead decamped to the Findhorn Institute, scene of the singer’s mid-90s spiritual retreat after the sound and fury of New York, but crucially, the place where his dark and broody first solo album Bring ’Em All In was recorded. I say crucially because Universal Hall has more in common with that collection than any in the band’s canon.

Gone are the distorted kaleidoscopes of A Rock In The Weary Land, back are natural fibres, and if Wickham plays a subsidiary role, his high lonesome keenings are integral to the prevailing air of windswept ennui. This is a mottled work, by turns inspiring, uplifting and unfortunate. Scott is always a songwriter to be reckoned with, a flinty-eyed figure who can make lines like “I’m gonna look twice at you/Until I see the Christ in you” sound positively threatening, and who possesses the necessary gravitas to carry off a monastic epic like ‘Peace Of Iona’. Plus, he’s a writer of unabashedly romantic love songs (‘Every Breath Is Yours’) that look you straight in the eye, irony-free.

But sometimes his love of Blake-ean language crosses the line into twee New Age-y platitudes that try even long-time fans like myself, as with the robust folk-rock stomper ‘This Light Is For The World’. Also, Universal Hall sometimes sounds like a series of unfinished songs, fragments, mantras like ‘Silent Fellowship’ and ‘EBOL’. Worst offender is ‘Seek The Light’, a faddish folly that conjures the grisly spectre of Jan Hammer by way of JRR Tolkien. Still, such lapses of taste and judgement do serve to throw a flattering light on tracks like the title tune or the Zen-nos of ‘I’ve Lived Here Before’, as good a poem as Burns or Yeats never wrote.

Diehards should find a good half dozen songs to crow about on Universal Hall, the rest of the general public will doubtless remain as bamboozled as ever.