You know, for someone who spent most of the ’80s directionless and confused about what the values in his music were, Roy Harper has made quite a stark recovery since 1990’s Once. Each album since has been an enjoyable affair from the cult-classic wordsmith and elegant string-picker, culminating in 2000’s The Green Man, which can truly be considered great and one of Harper’s best albums. With the trend continuing even through a 13-year gap, fans can rest assured that Roy Harper hasn’t lost a bit of his beautiful communicative guitar playing or compositional skill, and that Man & Myth is even better than The Green Man.

Harper returns to a more structurally complex progressive style, which Man & Myth only benefits from compared to its predecessor as it still manages to be nine minutes shorter despite these longer songs. Fairly new to the mix are perfectly fitting brass arrangements and organs, and returning are the usually subtle sweeping strings along with Roy Harper’s occasional electric guitar playing. However, where old Harper albums often divided the songs between acoustic and hard rock numbers, Man & Myth remains soft throughout and the electric guitar shows up sporadically when called for to give these slow songs some much needed propulsion and extra resonance.

“Heaven Is Here” is the token Harper-epic, and it seems to be an attempt to one-up “Me and My Woman,” the man’s best-ever song. And I’ll be damned, because it’s actually worthy to be in the song’s shadow. Maybe I’m jumping the gun, but I already feel confident in saying that this is Roy Harper’s second best album in all his decades of recording. It’s been nearly 42 years since Stormcock, and I doubt you’ll find any musician this old with still so much ambition. Let us pray that it’s shown Roy Harper truly has ascended us all and will be the first man to be immortal so he can keep producing albums of this caliber in his distinctive gentle-yet-authoritative style—a true mystic.

Also, Cloud Cuckooland? Isn’t that a stage in Banjo-Tooie? That game was pretty cool too.