Binker & Moses helped set the UK New Jazz template, but Binker Golding has chafed against its tenets ever since. Previewing this material at a winter gig which steamed with exertion and emotion, its swerve into 1980s heartland rock felt startling, ballsy and right. Now his intentions are clearer, there in song titles relating a period in which a parent, stepparent and friends died, and approaching middle-age’s changes seized him. This is warmly mellow music, its big, wide open sound embracing the listener with plain feelings, melody and nostalgia. Hugh Padgham, sometimes maligned for the thunderous, decade-conquering snare sound he developed with Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins, and now a Gearbox executive director, follows work with Graham Costello’s STRATA and Binker & Moses by mixing with a subtly deep sense of space and sparing, ringing reverb, emphasising the room’s sound. The playing retains a hard bop mentality, leavened by AOR directness. Billy Adamson’s barndoor-big shivers of country blues slide open ‘(Take Me To The) Wide Open Low’, Sarah Tandy’s barroom piano and Golding’s rueful then soaring R&B tenor telling a story of sorrow and acceptance, with pleasurable music to get lost in. ‘Love Me Like A Woman’ is an enactment of sensual love, Golding, always animated by earthy hedonism, building to a scream, after dirty fuzz guitar. ‘My Two Dads’ sees his tenor intimately murmuring towards soft resolution, then accelerating into Pogues-like, cleansing delirium. ‘’Til My Heart Stops’ is somewhere between a love song and an elegy in a wake’s dying embers, closer now to death but still here. This is an album of positive reckoning, bittersweet but never less than alive.