Delivering his solo project's fifth album in as many years, Robert Sotelo -- the stage alias of U.K. musician Andrew Doig -- makes his second 2021 appearance with Celebrant. In contrast to the more solitary Leap & Bounce issued earlier in the year, it finds Sotelo's playfully trippy, homespun keyboard-and-drum-machine songs fleshed out by guests on brass, woodwinds, acoustic drums, and additional vocals. Guitars are a rarity here but aren't prohibited. While partly inspired by the bliss of becoming a newlywed, the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, and the death of a family member weigh heavily on a set that integrates joy, darkness, and anxiety. The bloopy "Dear Resident" opens the album with the words, "Celebrate endeavors/Oh, how I try," as a shadow looms over its chorus' buoyant melodic hook. Likeminded short-and-bittersweet pop songs, like the syncopated "Take Control of It" and "This Is My House," make a concerted effort to put mind over matter and focus on the positive, while "The Celebrant" breaks form by indulging in a 90-second introductory announcement (by Celia Morgan). It eventually settles into a dense Baroque psych-pop with layered vocal lines, live and programmed drums, saxophones (and later clarinets), and the record's nearly ever-present melodic keys. A handful of instrumentals, or near-instrumentals (the marching, cinematic "Through Cycles"), are scattered throughout the track list, with penultimate entry "Palermo" offering a street scene replete with wistful acoustic guitar and flute score. Sotelo brings it back indoors and inside his head for the bass-heavy, minor-key keyboard track "True Culmination," an oblique love song that explores negative thinking and gratitude. Full of contradictions, Celebrant is both musically whimsical and lyrically apprehensive, and while it's not Sotelo's catchiest set to date, it is his most nuanced.