Album: The Waterboys - Life, Death and Dennis Hopper

Mike Scott is The Waterboys. Launched by wide-eyed 1980s folk-rock, and “The Whole of the Moon”, he’s long since roamed into whatever stylistic gumbo he fancies. The latest album – the band’s 16^th – is a concept piece, a 25-track sonic biography of the late Hollywood maverick Dennis Hopper.

It’s sometimes entertaining, sometimes preposterous, and sometimes pure cringe. The songs follow the chronology of Hopper’s life. For instance, there’s a floaty Floyd-ish song early on called “Blues for Terry Southern”, in honour of Easy Rider’s co-writer, while near the end is “Golf, They Say”, a southern soul roller about Hopper’s late life love of the game (“The boys on the poster got old”). The actor-director-photographer’s life is also offered as a paean to the wild counterculture of the Sixties and Seventies.

But the real key is a quote from Scott, reflecting the album’s genesis: “I figured if I wrote another couple of tracks about Dennis, maybe pick a few episodes from his colourful life, we'd have a nice little Extended Play record. But fate intervened. Some of the other Waterboys did some secret recording without me, then sent me seven beautiful instrumentals and an accompanying note saying, ‘Can you put lyrics to these?’ Well, yes, indeed I could.”

Life, Death and Dennis Hopper feels cobbled together. Sixteen of the numbers are under two-and-a-half minutes long, jams with psyched purple prose voice-overs representing aspects of Hopper’s life. They feel pastiche-like, akin to trashy film trailers (one is even written as such), and there are five instrumentals, each representing one of Hopper’s wives. Much of it sounds like Alabama 3 mucking about – one such even has Bruce Springsteen on. Simply put, it’s tonally clunky. These aspects come to a head with the embarrassing “Frank (Let’s Fuck)”, an icky hard-rockin’ tribute to the demented villain of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.

Let us not, however, throw the baby out with the bath water. There are also songs that have heft, including the Steve Earle-sung acoustic country “Kansas”, the love’n’domestic violence piano ballad, “Letter From an Unknown Girlfriend”, featuring Fiona Apple, the early-Grateful Dead grooviness of “The Tourist”, and others too. By the end, although I winced along the way, I also enjoyed part of the ride. It’s an interesting exercise, but unlikely to bear repeated end-to-end listens.

• More New Music reviews on theartsdesk

Below: Watch the distinctly whiffy video for "Hopper's on Top" by The Waterboys