Kansas Smitty's is a Hackney bar as well as a band, a musical utopia whose name was conjured from speakeasy pipe-dreams and the trad and gypsy jazz tendencies of transplanted American leader Giacomo Smith (though more current jazz lingos are also spoken, in the bar at least). This fourth album's title track was inspired by more subtly poignant nostalgia, the fading memories and fond lives secreted in faint smells, faces or the history discernible in a cracked wall or alley shadow, the personal psychogeography with which we recognise the world's tender spots.

‘Things Happened Here’ therefore plays a misty intro, pianist Joe Webb stepping out of the fog with even his name recalling Dragnet's creator, and the atmosphere one of corpseless, mild noir.

As elsewhere, though, the tap and roll of Will Cleasby's drums soon settles into almost martial lockstep. A Caribbean flavour to Memphis blues tribute ‘Sunnyland’, the ballroom shuffle of ‘Two Dancers’, and brief guitar squall of ‘Judgement’ – the track closest to evoking New Orleans marching bands and funeral rites – only defer this tendency to the static and staccato.

Kansas Smitty's pull towards the past never congeals into the weightily torpid, and finds inspiration between the European wars, not in easy Dixieland retro. Nor, though, does it pour hot, beating blood into its 20th century ghosts.