Musicians mature and progress all the time, honing their craft and tweaking their style from album to album in order to explore new territory, broaden their audience, or both.  Kurt Vile has certainly done all that on Smoke Ring For My Halo, and yet it also feels like he’s done something even more transcendent, like he’s taken one or two giant leaps along a Noble Eightfold Path toward some kind of Slacker Nirvana.

On his previous albums (including 2009’s Childish Prodigy, which I recommended right here) Vile wrote some superbly catchy ’70s-baked pop-rock tunes, tailor-made for cruising the USA by car or train, and he sang them in a voice too-cool for technique yet undeniably charismatic.  He then submerged those tunes in waves of lush lo-fi noise, his guitars and vocals glimmering and bleeding like streetlamps painted by French Impressionists.  The only big drawback of those earlier albums is that they tend to lose focus as they unfold, shaking their grips off the hooks and eventually sinking way too far into murky depths of shapeless sound. With Smoke Ring For My Halo, however, Vile has cleaned up his act a little without abandoning his hazy, unpolished charms.  The songs are much tighter, and Vile’s words are no longer soaked in reverb and distortion- just kind of moistened- as if he’s more confident in the wit of his lyrics and less shy about his thin, untrained voice.  Not surprisingly, this all results in his best album yet.

It’s a delightfully deceptive album, one that revels in contradictions ranging from sudden & obvious to gradual & subtle.  It emanates such a cozy, laid-back vibe (even more so than other Kurt Vile records) that it’s often easy to overlook how much life is in the music, especially the nimble-fingered guitar-playing.  Similarly, the tracks that rock (”Puppet To The Man,” “Society Is My Friend,” “In My Time”) do so without getting particularly loud or heavy.  The songs also cleverly disguise their complexity; at first, they almost sound like they were improvised while Vile was dicking around on his guitar, drugged and drowsy on the couch.  Before too long, though, the melodies work their magic and it becomes apparent that these tunes aren’t half-assed at all- Vile just sings them that way.

Much like Robert Louis Stevenson’s essay “An Apology For Idlers,” Smoke Ring For My Halo illustrates the fine and valuable distinction between being idle and being useless.  “Idleness so called…does not consist in doing nothing,” Stevenson wrote. “[A] faculty for idleness implies…a strong sense of personal identity.”  Only Vile’s kindred philosophy also involves a healthy dose of Zen koan-like paradox, which he articulates in “Peeping Tomboy”:  “I wanna work/ but I don’t wanna sit around/ all day frowning…I wanna give up/ but I kinda wanna lie down/ but not sleep, just rest…”

Obviously, Vile has mellowed out even further, but that doesn’t mean he’s getting too soft, or shedding his irreverent attitude.  In “Puppet To The Man,” when he sings “Right now you probably think I’m a puppet to the man,” his tone sneers, and fuck you for thinking such a thing. Then in the next line he adds, “Well I’ll tell you right now, you best believe that I am,” and this time his tone spits, and fuck you if you think I care what you think. Two tracks later, he opens with the decidedly non-rock-n-roll lyric, “Society is my friend,” right before twisting that sentiment like a rusty knife: “it makes me lie down in a cold bloodbath.”  Yet despite all the sneering and borderline sociopathy, Vile remains cool enough to contain his anger, as if merely muttering his more disturbed thoughts is enough to keep him on the road to inner peace.  Any slivers of darkness are outshined by Vile’s constant stream of waggish wit, and the occasional flickers of sweetness, like in the endearingly clingy love song “Baby’s Arms.”

By the time Smoke Ring For My Halo closes with the happy-go-lucky sleepwalk of “Ghost Town,” Vile sounds like he’s ascended to the level of Holy Fool, or at least stoner Buddha.  “Raindrops may fall on my head sometimes/ but I don’t pay ‘em any mind,” he shrugs.  “Then again, I guess it ain’t always that way.”  The album fades out before Vile can explain whether it’s the raindrops or his unconcern that ain’t always that way, and it’s a perfectly ambiguous conclusion.  In most other contexts, it would probably come across as a trivial throwaway, but here in Vile’s hands, it feels like a sacred epiphany.

Kurt Vile’s Childish Prodigy provides an ideal soundtrack to a 42-minute train ride for someone with plenty to think about.  The songs chug forward with steady locomotive rhythms, and the album as a whole encapsulates that Zen-like railroad-riding state of mind- especially if you’re still buzzed from the night before and in desperate need of sleep.  Thoughts flow in a muddy stream of nebulous consciousness; recurring flashbacks drift into internal rehearsals for future conversations, grievances not yet aired, true feelings still hidden; gut-scraping anger and disgust yield to resignation and tenderness, and back again, and back again, resonating with daydream reverb against the walls of inner space; time seems frozen under an Impressionistic magic hour sky, even as the outside world zips across the window.

It’s an absorbing soundscape, particularly through headphones.  The deft mix of apparent influences is equally enchanting: the endearing, spontaneous amateurism of Robert Pollard bathed in Tom Petty’s Southern jangle and topped with a splash of Iggy Pop’s bile.  Throughout most of Childish Prodigy, the gorgeous and gritty formula works wonders.  I was hooked from the start by rockers like “Hunchback,” “Freak Train” and “Monkey,” while more tranquil songs like “Dead Alive,” “Overnite Religion” and “Blackberry Song” grew on me more with each spin.  Too bad the album loses most of its steam toward the end.  Despite some neat flourishes- the heartwarming trumpet in “Amplifier,” the train-whistle harmonica of “Inside Lookin Out”- the record’s uninspired final third has little to offer.  By the end of it all I feel restless and frustrated, like when you zone out and miss your stop and now you’re stuck on the express for 15 more minutes.  Then you think to yourself: oh well, at least the scenery’s still pretty.