Jim O'Rourke's called his new album Simple Songs, the big kidder

And then…silence.

Well, no, that’s not quite right. Lord knows he’s kept busy, mixing some Wilco album that their label deemed not good enough to release, and producing a Joanna Newsom LP that she only bothered writing five songs for. He joined Sonic Youth. He left Sonic Youth. He moved to Japan, recorded a tribute album to Burt Bacharach, curated a cancelled ATP Festival, unleashed an endless stream of experimental releases via Bandcamp, and, in 2009, put out The Visitor – his first LP since Insignificance to see release in his home country. It was a forty-minute, one-track avant-folk album. Because of course it was.

But in all that time, he almost entirely stayed away from singing. You get the sense that, after Insignificance, O’Rourke felt he knew everything there is to know about pop music as an art form and, having come to understand it so completely, ultimately decided it’s beneath him. Why else would one of the few vocal cuts he’s released in the interim have been a cover of “Viva Forever”, which recasts the Spice Girls ballad as a Neil Young wigout not a million miles from “Cortez the Killer”?

Simple Songs as a title is a classic O’Rourke curveball – the album’s eight tracks are as complex and intricate as anything he’s has released, with or without vocals. You can’t predict a single beat of this record. Allegedly, much like on The Visitor, most of the instruments (including strings and brass) were played by O’Rourke himself. His voice has become a weathered beast, with more than a decade of chainsmoking and the life of a Tokyo bon vivant giving it a worn-in quality it never quite had before.

It’s most evident on opening track “Friends With Benefits”, a winding folk jam akin to the best parts of O’Rourke’s 1999 album Eureka, which opens with yet another curveball, husked out from his larynx like a grumpy Warren Zevon, raised from the dead: “Nice to see you once again / Been a long time my friend / Since you’ve crossed my mind at all.”

It’s like meeting up for a coffee with an old buddy, only to find he’s put salt in your latte. And that’s O’Rourke in a nutshell – he’s the master of this sort of thing, he wants to remind you of it at every point, and he definitely needs you to know he can churn this stuff out in his sleep. “Not hard to figure out,” he sings later, “this ain’t no social call.”

Across the record, O’Rourke’s encyclopaedic knowledge of 20th century music is entirely apparent, but pieced together in a way that never sounds like it’s being rubbed in your face. Minimalist Steve Reich-like piano motifs, bossa nova marimbas and a timely doff of the cap to the slick guitars and weary worldview of Steely Dan are all stacked on top of each other. The shuffling beat and jazz chords on “Last Year” (key lyric: “He’s an artist – he’s committed to his craft…to be honest, I think he does it for a laugh”) beg you to imagine a world in which Burt Bacharach writes the charts for a math rock record.

Like I said, Jim O’Rourke sounds like he’s above the idea of pop music, but in much the same way as a high school teacher can teach Of Mice and Men for decades and still get something new from it. Much like Black Messiah, a slightly more heralded return of another long-absent polymath, it rewards repeated listens, even if they’ll barely bring you closer to actually understanding it.

Simple Songs may well be the ultimate example of meta-pop – plunderphonics with an orchestra. If you like the prospect of having your Beatles-y piano reveries interrupted by unexpected Queen quotes, or pseudo-power ballad screams, this will enhance your year. If that doesn’t sound appealing…well, maybe you can just enjoy the simple songs.