I'm starting to see the bigger picture," wrote Mike Scott on the last Waterboys album, Room to Roam. "I'm beginning to color it in." Scott has the picture clearly in focus on Dream Harder, the band's sixth and most fully realized album. Scott wrestles with the ancient Irish spiritual dilemma, pitting animate nature (or paganism) against Christian mysticism. The forces war within him, just as they did in James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, Sean O'Casey and John Millington Synge and still do in Van Morrison and Bono. Scott emerges from this struggle with an answer that frees him altogether, synthesizing the God of his Christian upbringing, the forces of nature and rock & roll itself into one overarching trinity united by the power of his imagination.

Scott uses love as the organizational principle for the personal transformation he chronicles on Dream Harder. In "Suffer" he announces his liberation from a former lover, using a reggae-inspired arrangement to enforce the metaphor of his oppression under her tyranny. On the rest of the album, Scott revels in ecstatic awakenings and epiphanies closely related to images revolving around new relationships, marriage and birth.

Millennial thinking signifies a brandnew world of possibilities to Scott in the transcendent set opener, "The New Life." The song soars as the Waterboys rock out fiercely in one of the most anthemlike tracks the band has recorded. The high spirits carry over to "Glastonbury Song," a series of poetic hymns to angels and nature deities set to a dancing melody on an electric piano. Scott stays airborne on "Preparing to Fly," which rises above a Beatlesque landscape on the wings of his majestic guitar solo.

Scott has a gift for matching haunting melodic fragments to the well-turned phrase, but he outdoes himself in setting Yeats's "Love and Death" to a stately chorus. The Yeats poem prefigures Scott's own imagery on the album, perfectly setting up the mystic observations in "Spiritual City" and "Wonders of Lewis." In "The Return of Pan" Scott's myth-making vision identifies the Greek god of fertility and music with Jesus, deftly fusing these traditionally oppositional figures. This New Age trinity is completed in "The Return of Jimi Hendrix," a dreamscape in which Hendrix becomes a rock & roll savior, reappearing on earth for a night to make a series of magic cameos "on a dozen stages in the clubs of New York."

With less than seven years left until the year 2000, the millennial boom is already swelling. Mike Scott takes a poet's peek at these forces on Dream Harder, and he still can't get the smile off his face. (RS 660/661)

JOHN SWENSON