Barn Nova, the latest record by the hyper-prolific musical collective known as MV & EE, resembles a majestic, gigantic, moderately psychedelic Appalachian tree. It’s rooted deep in the soil and its branches reach high enough to sway in the stratosphere. It’s a perfect place to spend an afternoon daydreaming in the shade, or an evening of stoned stargazing. Unfortunately, its biggest limitation is that it never really goes anywhere.

The album begins pleasantly and promisingly with a little sunny-morning ditty called “Feelin’ Fine.” Like all the songs here, it’s less of a composition than a sparse framework for various acoustic, electric and steel gee-tar licks to ramble, mingle and evaporate like wisps of incense smoke. The drums are pretty much there just to keep time and provide a minimal pulse, and Matt Valentine’s phantasmal, reverb-saturated vocals simply fill in the spaces where vocals are supposed to go. The second track, “Get Right Church,” picks up a funkier, trippier vibe while Erika Elder takes the mic and half-whispers a simple blues melody in her aloof sweetheart voice.

After listening to these tracks for the first time, I got my hopes up that Barn Nova would prove to be a special record, a beautiful marriage between the jaunty, half-cracked noodling of Wilco’s A Ghost Is Born and the sensual, shimmering haze of Mazzy Star’s So Tonight That I Might See. But then the album seems to lie down in the grass for a short weed nap, and it doesn’t quite recover. The wistful, ethereal “Snapperhead” evokes little more than a scrapped outtake from The Flaming Lips’ sessions for The Soft Bulletin. “Summer Magic” features flashes of inspired guitar heroics, including some by special guest star J Mascis, but those moments occur far between wide stretches of oppressively melancholy atmosphere. Around the 10-and-a-half minute mark of another fitfully engaging dirge called “Bedroom Eyes,” the drums start to rev up, as if the band’s finally ready to set the controls for the heart of the sun and blast off. To my dismay, those triple-time drum fills amount to nothing more than a tease, and the song fizzles to a close less than thirty seconds later.

In a folky Neil Young-like ballad called “Fully Tanked,” Valentine asks, “How can I miss you if you never leave?” and whenever I hear it, I can’t help but be reminded of how I feel about Barn Nova; though I have a soft spot for MV & EE’s laid-back intoxication, I tend to easily lose patience when they drift through the valleys because they so rarely explore the peaks.