ONCE THERE WAS A TIME WHEN SPACE AND TIME WERE ONE

On their latest-to-date voyage My Brother The Wind takes a scenic detour from the noisier psychedelic flights of the band's first two albums. Previously their music was born in a rush of spontaneous enthusiasm, from conception to recording to real-time mixing all within a matter of hours. A little more deliberation clearly went into this session, and as a result the impact isn't as immediate.

But the album has its own specific resonance, on reflection a sign of maturity instead of a lack of passion (my knee-jerk initial reading). It's all about sustaining a uniform mood and emotion, minus some of the brash, youthful intensity that illuminated their earlier output. The evocative title track is a perfect example, beginning with an unexpected strum of luscious 12-string guitar and ending the in a haze of prolonged guitar harmonics, adrift in the aether. Surrounding it are a brace of otherworldly one-chord vamps, somewhat stereotypical to be sure, but on further exposure making a virtue of the band's attractive reto-'70s attitude.

The change of pace was cued in part by newcomer Daniel Fridlund Brandt, replacing Tomas Eriksson on the drum stool and bringing a measured rhythmic intensity to the quartet's otherwise incendiary space jams, in effect positioned as a tether holding the two guitarists in check. If the drummer's role in a band is to "stoke the fire" (quoting Jack DeJohnette, who ought to know), the flames in this set resemble a comfortable bed of embers instead of the raging blaze heard on their first albums.

Or perhaps the poached egg came before the steamed chicken, and it was the new musical direction that required a different improvisational approach. Either way, the results might actually prove more rewarding in the long run, for both the group and its fans. The fraternal wind isn't the same brisk zephyr we might have been expecting, but a cooling breeze can still be refreshing after a long hot spell. In cosmic terms, the album is perhaps analogous to the silent but awesome echo of an expanding interstellar nebula, eons after a cataclysmic supernova explosion.