IT would be too simple to say that where The Waterboys' mystic minstrel Mike Scott sees the light, urbane misery Lloyd Cole sees only darkness. Too simple maybe, but 20 years on from their Edinburgh starts in music - Scott was born there, Cole studied at the university - they remain the intrepid extrovert and surly introvert respectively.

Scott re-launched his Waterboys band project in 2000, after a seven-year gap, with a return to the bombastic idealism and big music of 1985's This Is The Sea on A Rock In The Weary Land. Now he appears to be re-tracing his career path through the Eighties. With fiddler Steve Wickham back on board, The Waterboys set sail once more for the quieter, acoustic Celtic folk of 1988's Fisherman's Blues, this time recording in the basement studio of Universal Theatre, a community-built theatre in Findhorn, Scotland. The titles say everything - This Light Is For The World, Christ In You, Peace Of Iona, Seek The Light - signifying that Scott is on a spiritual crusade again, singing of a "grand canyon state of mind", sometimes lost for words at the wonder of it all. The tunes take longer than usual to transport you to a magical place but, like Scott at 44, this record is not in a hurry. Rest awhile amid its ethereal charms.

Universal Hall marks the start of Scott's own record company, a destiny that might have faced Lloyd Cole after his wilderness years on the obscure French label XIII Bis. However, like Steve Winwood, BabyBird's Stephen Jones and Hall & Oates, he has found a new home at the aptly named Sanctuary for his highest-profile release since 1995's Love Story. Laid-back, soft furnishings - acoustic, Spanish and steel guitars, ambient electronica, piano and no drums - form a minimalist frame for rueful, typically literate short stories on the lot of a 40 year old high on irony but low on iron. Relationships with women, drugs and pop are amusingly charted with world-weary perception, as Cole retains his role of the novelist outsider, the sorrowful foreigner to all around him.

Scott remains an outsider too, but where the disdainful Cole seems to revel in recording privately in his New England hideaway, the Waterboy would be happy if you were to join him on his spiritual odyssey.

Updated: 10:58 Thursday, June 26, 2003