What could have curdled into polemic instead unfurls with a novelist's patience. The song's architecture owes an obvious debt to the artist's stated heroes — the plainspoken candour of Neil Young, the melodic sleight of hand of Paul Simon — but the layering underneath, thick with overdubbed guitars, banjo, ukulele and stacked "choir" vocals recorded take upon take, points more directly toward David Bowie's magpie instincts and David Byrne's love of controlled chaos. This is a record built by someone who has spent decades learning what a studio can do and has finally been handed the keys to his own.

That the whole thing was tracked in a home studio, far from the "grim 24 track" rooms the artist recalls fighting through in his band days, matters enormously to how it sounds. Nothing here feels rushed toward a clock. The mixes breathe. Vocal takes are allowed to pile up into something choral rather than merely thickened, and the arrangements have the unhurried logic of a person following an idea until it resolves itself, rather than until the session budget runs out.

The closing pairing with 'Footprints' — inspired, remarkably, by 900,000-year-old human footprints discovered in a Norfolk riverbed — gives the EP its widest lens. Where 'Old Blighty' interrogates a few centuries of British history, 'Footprints' zooms out to geological time, to continents drifting and shorelines rewriting themselves over millennia. It is a bold pivot, colonial reckoning to deep time in the space of two songs, and it works because the same unhurried, curious sensibility governs both: this is a writer who reads history and science for pleasure and lets the two conversations bleed into each other on record.

Guitarist John Horton, a former bandmate from the Noseflutes days, adds lead guitar and keyboard textures to both bookend tracks, and his contributions feel less like guest spots than old friends finishing sentences. Tom Waits's line about songs being strange, simple things that will move on to someone else if you don't catch them, feels like the EP's unofficial epigraph — these are songs that were clearly caught in the act of forming, not forced into shape.

*Old Blighty* is not interested in easy comfort, nor in easy condemnation either. It sits with complicated history and even more complicated geology, and asks its audience to sit there too, buoyed by melody sturdy enough to make the discomfort worth staying for. Few EPs manage that trick with such quiet confidence. This one does, twice over.