Cohesion is the astonishing part. Gathering songs from different years normally exposes the seams. Production fashions shift, voices weather, and a writer's preoccupations wander off. Wälzlein's have stayed put. At six he survived a serious heart operation, and that brush with the abyss has stayed with him, resurfacing as existential questions throughout his lyrics. His first stay in a silent retreat then rearranged his understanding of life. Set those two events side by side and you have the spine of this record: fear on one side, stillness on the other, and eleven songs pacing the corridor between them. Old or new, the same man asks the same questions, only with steadily more nerve.

Take "Tapestry", which grows out of hospital memories of fear, loneliness and the need for affection, all pinned to a small yellow dog on the wallpaper that unexpectedly became a source of hope. No committee of professional songwriters could have invented that dog. It is too specific and too odd, and it is exactly the kind of detail that turns a stranger's childhood terror into your own. The song sits comfortably beside "Letter from Paulus", which asks what becomes of sacrifice, generosity and recognition when love is missing inside, a theme familiar to anyone who has endured a wedding reading and rarely handled with this much bite. "Holy Man" then turns the search for God into a conversation in which the answers end up arriving from within the questioner. It is an old idea, but he delivers it without a sermon's pomp or a greetings card's varnish.

Then the voice, which is what gets under the skin. The press notes speak of a slightly smoky Mick Jagger colouring, and for once the publicist is not fibbing. Imagine Jagger after a fortnight in a silent retreat rather than a fortnight in Marrakech: the husk without the swagger. It is an intense, soulful instrument that can lean into a passionate rock climax and, a bar later, retreat to something barely above a confidence. The arrangements follow suit. Choruses decline to arrive on cue, and verses wander off and return changed. Anyone hoping to hum along by the second chorus will be put out. Anyone who persists will find the melodies have quietly moved into the house.

Mysticism in popular music is usually a polite word for mush, a man gesturing vaguely at the cosmos. Wälzlein sidesteps it by being more curious about questions than answers, and by keeping one eyebrow raised throughout, so the piety stays honest. Soulful folk and a mystical note make an unlikely marriage, and he officiates with a straight face and a guitar.

*Elf* is no party record. It is a record for the walk home, the long train journey, the kitchen after everyone has gone to bed. Its ambition is modest in volume and enormous in scope: to make the listener stop arguing with the day and listen to their own chest. Wälzlein of all people has earned the right to suggest it. Play it loud enough to be moved and quiet enough to hear the room. Then, as the old songs and the new ones seem to insist, play it again.