Seventeen years after former Talk Talk bassist Paul Webb made his first record as Rustin Man – Out of Season, with Beth Gibbons – he’s finally putting out a solo album. Apparently he wanted to learn the assorted instruments he plays on it well enough to be comfortable recording himself, and had to build up the arrangements as his capabilities increased. Each instrument’s contribution to the album was recorded in turn, rather than track by track, yet it sounds like an organic whole. In fact, it sounds magnificent.

There’s an appealing woodiness to it, not just to Webb’s attractively weathered voice, but to the warm and rich arrangements, where brass, keys and Lee Harris’s subtle, limber drumming propel the songs back and forth between psychedelia and folk: The World’s in Town occupies a place not dissimilar to the one Pink Floyd sometimes occupied in the 1970s, on those surprisingly intimate, lazy ballads. Drift Code has sturdy songs, which are in turn given a patina of age by the way Webb has recorded them. It’s not so much that something like Our Tomorrows sounds as if it could have been recorded in 1971, more that it seems to exist in a time of its own. Occasionally, one is reminded of Broadcast at their most pastoral, for that same determination to find or found some timeless folk tradition of their own. It’s gorgeous.