It seems like A Turn in the Dream-Songs is something of a transitional moment for Jeffrey Lewis; having shed the Junkyard who backed him up on his last record, 2009′s masterful ‘Em Are I, Lewis is shouldering the album’s burden alone – albeit supported by a rotating cast of Wave Pictures, Dr Dogs, Misty’s Big Adventures amongst others. Dream-Songs takes the manifesto from ‘If Life Exists(?)’ – “It’s hard to get too bored when you pick the right two chords” – and runs with it, stretching out running times and expanding arrangements to far greater effect than any of his previous work.

Yet, for all the production gloss (at least by Lewis’s standards), the drifting woodwinds of ‘To Go and Return’ and the shuffling ‘I Got Lost”s lush strings, piano and mandolin only serve to highlight the record’s barely-there atmosphere, and arguably help it live up to its title. A couple of tracks do jolt Dream-Songs out of its torpor, and they’re the ones which hark back to the Jeff Lewis of old; lead single ‘Cult Boyfriend’ is the record’s rampant rocker, which heralds the unsung heroes of popular culture – WFMU radio, Flannery O’Connor and the Misfits, for example – before cleverly channelling those concerns into his woes about his career and lovelife. Meanwhile, ‘Krongu Green Slime’ might be his most inventive lyric yet; a solo acoustic anti-consumerist rant, imagining the brand monopoly of one particular brand of promethean gunk (“There might’ve been better sludges, but no one ever tried them,”) until its market stronghold was ruined by evolution.

It’s not a reviewer’s place to work out an artist’s chemical state while they’ve been making a record, but A Turn in the Dream-Songs sounds like an album blunted by anti-depressants. In recent interviews and comics, Jeff’s been alluding to some pretty traumatic break-ups and personal issues, but his blanker-than-usual delivery across these thirteen songs is almost a cause for concern; even more worryingly, the record’s darkest moment is also its funniest and best. ‘So What If I Couldn’t Take It’ is a veritable shopping list of some of the most blackly comic suicide attempts since Brian from The Breakfast Club hid a flare gun in his locker, but also manages to fit in pleasantly distracting swipes at call centres, the mafia, New York City waste management and a certain widely-read decimal-friendly American music website.

Having put out at least an album every year in the last half-decade, not to mention touring relentlessly and writing and illustrating countless issues of his own comic book, A Turn in the Dream-Songs might mark the moment where Jeffrey Lewis’s prolificness has finally caught up with him. There are moments of disappointing self-parody, especially the sad-sack ‘When You’re by Yourself’, which only a hardened Lewis acolyte could love, and even with a couple of instrumental interludes, the album is his longest yet – and feels like it. It’s sad to say, but two years on from his best work, there’s just too much by-numbers writing here, and a new and disappointing vacancy which seeps across the whole record. And that’s A Turn in the Dream-Songs - less the great idea you had in the middle of the night and more like the incoherent scribbles you find on your bedside table the next morning.