Ward Richmond’s a great example of the way the music sector (it’s difficult to call it a business or an industry) works these days. After touring in various bands with varying degrees of success between 1998 and 2006, he left live music behind in favour of a more traditional career path. In times past, that would have meant goodbye to music, with its cycle of album releases and tours, but times have changed. It’s more difficult to make a decent living from music now, but it’s much easier to release an album when you have it ready to go. That’s the route Ward Richmond’s gone down; he released “The Warden” in 2016 and four years later he’s releasing “Highly Meditated”.

The album’s a fascinating mix of humour, nostalgia, anxieties and gradual renunciation of vices (all the usual ones) and introduction of virtues (meditation and yoga). It’s a midlife album, but it’s far from a crisis; Ward is weighing up the pros and cons of the old and the new existence through the lens of parenthood. However happy the memories of the past are, it’s a country we no longer live in, and that’s message of “Highly Meditated”.

The musical stylings are mainly country-inflected but with a few notable exceptions, such as the final song “These Days” which opens with a drum pattern that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on an Adam and the Ants single in the eighties before morphing into a rockabilly workout punctuated by a spoken middle eight about the virtues of hot yoga. “I Need A Water Fountain” references another facet of the eighties (and late seventies), FM radio drivetime with maybe a hint of Journey in there, whereas “Hey Levi” looks back a decade further to the sound of The Band at their peak.

Ward Richmond looks forward and backward with a wry sense of humour that’s obvious in the lyrics and sometimes in the musical stylings as well. There’s plenty of self-deprecation in the backward and forward views that, along with humour, somehow underlines the seriousness of the overall message; at some point, most of us actually grow up.

“Highly Meditated” is out now as a download.

You want to know the way to listen to this album? Open road, windows down, volume up. It’s just a shame the old Capri shuddered to a halt decades ago. It was about the same vintage as the tunes and bands that inspired “Before Dark Clouds”. It’s released on the Jigsaw label, which specialises in recording to analogue tape as the first step in the production process and I have to admit the process works spectacularly well for Austin Gold. And now you’re going to ask, quite rightly, what type of music this is.

Well, it’s the kind of music that I heard a lot of in my teenage years. I’ll name the influences, you can work out my age. The influences that immediately spring to mind are bands that combined stunning rock guitar players with slightly more soulful Hammond players like Jon Lord and Vincent Crane. Combine that with classic rock vocal stylings hinting at Paul Rodgers and David Coverdale, riffs-a-plenty, strong melodies and the occasional flurry of twin lead guitar and you’ve pretty much got it covered. And let’s not forget the occasional power ballad to for a bit of contrast.

The album’s opener is a statement of intent, with a killer guitar riff, subtle hints of Hammond and a huge seventies rock vocal. The chorus is massive, but the real highlight is the middle sixteen which launches a guitar solo contrasted with Hammond swirls and flurries; it stands up on its own, but it evokes the mood of seventies rock perfectly.

All the bases are covered; “The Reason” is funky and energetic, the title song hints at the melody and dynamics of Boston, “Home Ain’t Home” suggests Dave Gilmour’s guitar tone and “See the Light” could be early eighties American AOR (remember that term kids) by the likes of Journey or Foreigner. I’m not suggesting that “Before Dark Clouds” is derivative; the band picks out various elements, combinations of instruments, tones, melodies and rhythms that hark back to that era in the early to mid-seventies when all sorts of styles were melding and meshing and cross-pollinating to create new genres.

Bottom line: this album is beautifully played and constructed and it’s a whole lot of fun.

“Before Dark Clouds” is out now on Jigsaw.