In some ways, it picks up where his first full-length solo outing, 2013’s Regions of Light and Sound of God, left off, exploring theological terrain. James positions himself as a seeker. He’s practiced transcendental meditation since 2009, and he has long incorporated Christianity and Zen musings into his lyrics. But where his songs have often achieved an easy spiritual take-off, his latest dwells on eschatological matters. The end, James seems to sing over and over again, is nigh.

On “Same Old Lie,” he asks, “Is there any peace to be found in a lifetime?” It’s a bracing statement from James, usually packing a certain Aquarian sweetness in his songs with My Morning Jacket. And while there’s hope lingering on the edges of these songs too, the LP finds him confronting greed and the lingering threat of destruction with bleak, spooky language. “You can talk about it all you want / But what the fuck you’re gonna do / Time’s your oyster / The grave is always getting closer,” he promises on “We Ain’t Getting Any Younger Pt. 2.” 

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Working with producer Blake Mills, known for his work on Alabama Shakes’ Sound & Color, James crafts an instrumental template suitable to his dark night of the soul outlook. It’s funky in a subdued way, owing to lethargic trip-hop and spooky mid-’70s R&B — think Bill Withers or Shuggie Otis chopped and screwed. Initially known for reverb-drenched southern rock and cosmic Americana, James embraces the same psychedelic soul that informed My Morning Jacket’s 2015 The Waterfall. The drums and bass boom, the strings and synths rise, and James treats his voice like it’s plugged into an array of effects pedals, deploying distortion, pitch-shifting, and echo to create a multilayered tapestry of sounds.

The sumptuousness conjured up by James and Mills provides much of the redemption James resists providing lyrically. (The bass on “In the Moment” begs to be isolated for a YouTube video and studied.) But even as he reflects on “guns, blood, and sorrow,” James keeps the search up for moments of reflection and transcendence. He finds some of it in the closing song, the title track, where he duets with Kentucky’s Joan Shelly singing, “Walking in the shadows, I see clearly / I’m walking in the light.”

The dark and the light co-mingle in apocalyptic literature, the promise of deliverance after tribulation. So do they mingle in James’ songs, which dwell in the spaces “before the beginning and after the end,” as he sings on “True Nature.” This is James’ best solo album yet and perhaps his best work overall since My Morning Jacket’s It Still Moves. As expectant of the alpha as the omega, Eternally Even illustrates that even if the end’s inevitable, there are eternities to be experienced hiding in individual moments.

Jim James is scheduled to perform Sunday, December 11, at the Marquee Theatre in Tempe.