Unknown Mortal Orchestra: V (digital outlets)

To begin at the far end. The final track, Drag, on Ruban Nielson's Unknown Mortal Orchestra album V is a loose, six minute jam. It's of the kind you'd expect to hear on a bootleg of the early 80s Stones in a New York studio as Nielson, his brother Kody on drums and bassist Jake Portrait close this double album with a lazy, funky bluesy shuffle.

It's a wayward journey to this point, the collection opening with the six minute-plus psyche-pop of The Garden and with digressions to MOR jazz-pop and Hawai'i.

V – UMO's fifth album – arrives after a 20 month drip-feed of singles, among them a catchy original – about escaping a broken town with a tank of gas and a gun – called Layla (there's no copyright on song titles, Mr. Clapton) and the attention-getting I Killed Captain Cook.

That latter title might suggest a spittle-flecked punk thrash, but with languid acoustic guitars and something of the Hawaiian slack key style it comes quietly from a socio-political and post-colonial mindset: “I sent him along on his way, bringer of death and disgrace to the ancestral place. Although the man lay dead on the sand, darkness had not lifted there. There were much more on their way, with dollars in their hand”.

Portland-based Nielson – formerly of the enormously successful Mint Chicks with Kody – won a Taite Prize for UMO's 2012 self-titled debut, an APRA Silver Scroll (with Kody) for the 2015 song Multi-Love, best alternative album at the Tuis for the internationally acclaimed Multi-Love album (which in part explored his three-way relationship with his wife and lover) and has enjoyed numerous accolades.

He's been peripatetic, recording as UMO in Seoul, Hanoi (one result, the experimental instrumental album IC-01 Hanoi), Portland, Mexico City, Auckland and Reykjavik.

But V took him back to Hawai'i where his mother Deedee Aipolani Nielson (Miss Aloha Hula 1973) was born and lives, and who dances in the song's video.

As with previous UMO albums, there's a lot going on lyrically (among them post-relationship thoughts) and the music roams freely: soul pop-funk for Guilty Pleasures with the awkwardly sung “you were hotter than a cheap laptop just like the ones we looted from Target together” and some snappy guitar on the taut, Prince-influenced That Life: “Under the palm trees, look how they gracefully sway . . . why is there always crying and quarreling filtering through the malaise?”.

The Shin Ramyun instrumental and MOR pop of Weekend Run (“we'll be lost in love”) are the soundtrack to poolside cocktails.

But the diversity and album's lengthy gestation mean flat spots, filler and a lack of overall focus: the instrumental Keaukaha is slight; the pleasant L.A.-freeway jazz instrumental The Widow – father Chris on tenor saxophone – goes nowhere special for five minutes; there are defaults to soft 80s yacht-rock (Layla, The Beach, Nadja); that Stones' shuffle . . .

In this context I Killed Captain Cook is an outlier, losing its power on an interesting but shapeless collection in need of an editor.

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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here