J. Mamana’s second album comes mired with challenging baggage; across the album he attempts to reckon with existential topics like death and loss of faith, and make sense of the breakdown of his four year relationship. He peppers his gorgeously baroque arrangements with meditations on the confusing cruelty of the world around us and political despair, with enough scenery chewing to make Nicolas Cage blush.

Opening your album with a fugue for string quartet is a bold marker for its ambition. ‘Genius or Apostle’ ratchets up the high drama a minute in with sweeping, melancholic piano while the lyrics speak to intense, personal anguish. It’s a mode that Mamana rarely departs from, finding little time for levity across these eleven songs.

His penchant for self-harmonising and ability to find previously untapped vocal sounds is reminiscent of Dirty Projectors. But while Dave Longstreth and co. reach for conceptual heights to anchor their freewheeling creativity, Mamana is more deliberate and contemplative, turning over each and every facet of the problem rather than jumping from idea to idea. ‘No Fun’ embodies the dour character of the album as it considers hope (mostly a lack thereof) in withering sighs for eight minutes, occasionally spitting out a nihilistic aphorism like “Love is not a resurrection spell.”

But the album’s centrepiece is the meandering ‘New America.’ Ostensibly it’s a take on the production of D.W. Griffith’s 1916 epic Intolerance (his rebuttal to critics who took issue with his wildly racist Birth of a Nation). But woven within is a wonderfully rambling indictment of Hollywood’s (and the USA’s) corrupting influence. Some of Mamana’s richest imagery can be found here, like “the magi in cherry red” as well as his feel for interlocking language; the “fatuous dispatches” in the chorus is pure poetry. It’s also the most allegorical (and hence least specifically personal) song on the album, the one least loaded down with self-pity. Compare its flowery wordplay with a devastatingly straightforward line from the following song: “no-one ever tells the truth,” which even gets its own pregnant pause to let the moment land. Or even the weighty emphasis on was during ‘Ruins Handed Down’: “I was the one you wanted.”

However, if you aren’t focusing too hard on Mamana’s tales of woe then there’s ample beauty to be found in even the most dirgeful of songs. ‘Hope Saved July’ is pure despair (“Surely no-one in the world has felt this kinda pain”) but its orchestral flourishes illuminate a bright spot in the darkest corners. The same is true of the woozy arrangement on ‘Tenderness Lost’; self-described as a ‘waltz of resignation’ it wears its influences lightly, as concerned with the neoclassical as it is with the jaunty.

For Every Set of Eyes suggests a clunky riposte to ‘for your eyes only,’ Mamana broadcasting his pain instead of wallowing in it. Whether or not he finds any catharsis is left ambiguous by the album’s screeching end; “I wanna know/ Are you righteous or not?” he asks in the final minutes. But wherever he may find himself, there is still plenty for the listener to enjoy in this impressive sophomore album.