The headline news is the sound, and it is warm. Not warm in the lazy, cardigan-and-slippers sense the word usually attracts, but warm as a valve amplifier is warm, glowing and slightly dangerous to touch. Jaco has acquired new bass and guitar amps, and he plainly spent the first weeks getting to know them. The low end has weight without mud, and the guitars have bite without the usual shriek. The old Southern and hard rock records that haunt the EP, the sort that smell faintly of cigarettes and varnished wood, are present as a climate, never as costume. He borrows their swing and their appetite for a riff, then declines to ape their excesses.

Restraint is the real revelation. A friend who heard the finished record put it neatly, remarking that it was more considered, more measured and, to their ears, less cluttered than his earlier work. That is exactly right. Where past efforts might have piled idea upon idea until the mix groaned, *3* leaves air around everything. Songs arrive, state their business and leave. The writing is tighter and more structured, with verses that know where the chorus lives and choruses that reward the journey. Playing every instrument yourself is a recipe for self-indulgence, and Jaco has turned it into an advantage: the parts talk to each other like the members of a band who have long since stopped interrupting.

The songs themselves have a pleasing waywardness of subject. One is fuelled by the peculiar agony of supporting a sporting team through the lean seasons, the dogged, irrational hope of a fan hunting for that winning feeling. It is a theme that has produced a thousand terrace clichés, but Jaco handles it as a matter of temperament rather than flag-waving, and the music lifts and sags with the same stubborn optimism. Elsewhere he turns to a character study of a desperate, broke and thoroughly bungling thief, a small-time crook whose schemes unravel with a slapstick inevitability. Jaco sings him with sympathy rather than sneering, which is the difference between a caricature and a person. You root for the poor fellow even as the swag bag splits.

Then comes the curveball, a woozy, trippy portrait of existence viewed as though it were happening in a sandpit. It is a strange and rather wonderful conceit. The guitars shimmer and drift, time goes soft at the edges, and the whole thing feels like a childhood afternoon remembered through heat haze. That the same EP can accommodate terrace despair, petty crime and psychedelic playground reverie, and still sound like the work of one coherent mind, is no small trick.

*3* is modest in scale and generous in spirit, a collection made with care, good amplifiers and a decent view. Lyndo Jaco has made a record that sounds like him at his most assured. Play it loud, preferably with the window open.