Roddy Woomble's new album is as warm and snug as its title suggests

Jake Bugg: A Modern Day Distraction (RCA) ★★★

Van Morrison: New Arrangements and Duets (Exile) ★★★

Port Sulphur: Meta Guru (Last Night From Glasgow) ★★★★

Idlewild frontman Roddy Woomble takes a step back from his electronic alter ego Almost Nothing to return to his acoustic roots as a solo artist. His new “fireside record” Sometime During the Night We Fell Off the Map is as warm and snug as that might suggest, recorded on Mull with longtime collaborators Sorren Maclean and Hannah Fisher.

The songs look out from an island vista and then hunker down with Woomble gently ruminating on times past and his place in the present, no doubt inspired by having his teenage son Uist on guitar. He dices with the dichotomy of both wanting and fearing change on the intimate Still So Far to Go and is similarly ambivalent but hopeful on Good Despite Everything with Fisher on hand to soothe with her hummed backing vocals.

Not everything sounds as bare and delicate. Break Up the Sun conveys a rootsy soul and raw immediacy redolent of early REM, while Still Painting a Picture of You thrums with scrapping vocals and cheeky guitar.

The sepia-tinged hankering of Old Negatives, lamenting “a new Dark Age”, is dusted with Matt Carmichael’s saxophone for a smooth, atmospheric Eighties finish and his playing also embellishes the cool and classy pop of Read It Like a Secret. Woomble continues to brood philosophically over twanging guitar on All Things Considered but the key question here is: is it too early for a Christmas song? Not if it is Christmas Without You, a cosy Blue Nile-like reverie, with suitably angelic backing vocals and a suggestion of sleigh bells.

Onetime teen troubadour sensation Jake Bugg is now all of 30 years old but still attacking his music like a callow, hungry adolescent on A Modern Day Distraction. Following the escapism of predecessor Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, this former council kid takes a trip back to the old Trouble Town neighbourhood, doesn’t like what he sees and offers his stab at penning a British take on American Idiot.

He addresses the monotony and struggle of the gig economy on the pacey indie garage opener Zombieland but the refrain “round and round it goes” could just as easily apply to the song. He is on fertile ground for here-we-go (again) Oasis lighter-wavers, plaintive indie jangles and hell-for-leather garage pop, but there is little he can add to his Sixties and Nineties inspirations, apart from maybe the lightning flamenco riff on the Merseybeat skiffle of Breakout.

Van Morrison lived it all first time round and has been offering his idiosyncratic variations on a number of musical themes for over 60 years. He remains ridiculously prolific and his latest wheeze is dusting off and brushing up older material to atmospheric effect.

New Arrangements and Duets is just that, with Curtis Stigers, Joss Stone and the blessed Willie Nelson among his guests. He enlists jazz vocalist Kurt Elling to join him on Ain’t Gonna Moan No More (does that mean he’s done with his Covid rants?) and reaches further back to apply some big band blast to Avalon of the Heart. There are a couple of generic slumps but all is forgiven for a sumptuous rendition of I’ll Be Your Lover Too, originally from 1970 album His Band and the Street Choir.

With titles like Bill Nelson and Fast Boys & Factory Girls, Douglas MacIntyre aka Port Sulphur is wearing his post-punk influences on his sleeve. But they are also on his record, with Scars guitarist Paul Research guesting on the former and Subway Sect frontman Vic Godard making a cameo appearance on the latter. Orient Express time travels back to early Eighties Glasgow with punk and funk in joyful co-existence and Meta Guru closes with a lovelorn cover of Josef K’s It’s Kinda Funny.

CLASSICAL

Emily Sun: Film Fantasia (ABC Classic) ★★★★

Australian-born violinist Emily Sun is making her mark in the UK, where she is now resident. Later this month she performs the UK premiere in Wales of Fantasie im Wintergarten, a capricious concerto written for her by Soviet-born Australian composer Elena Kats-Chernin. Before that, though, it’s released as part of Sun’s impressive themed album Film Fantasia, sitting comfortably alongside Erich Korngold’s swashbuckling Concerto in D and John Williams’ heart-stopping Theme from Schindler’s List. The new concerto is a tantalising showpiece. Its gentle tangos, raunchy burlesque and silent movie references vie mischievously with Kats-Chernin’s resourceful scoring, Sun lapping up its shifting theatrical dynamic. Korngold’s 1940s showpiece, which pinches tunes from his own Hollywood soundtracks, is no less charismatic. The Schindler’s List theme inevitably provokes a tear. As these are live recordings - with the symphony orchestras of Tasmania, Adelaide and Melbourne respectively - they come with inbuilt applause. Well deserved. Ken Walton

JAZZ

Playtime: Morse Code Through the Lights (Interupto Music) ★★★★

Edinburgh’s Playtime collective of saxophonist Martin Kershaw, guitarist Graeme Stephen, bassist Mario Caribé and drummer Tom Bancroft surmounted Covid lockdown by inviting guests to join them remotely in live-streamed improvisations. This album captures these extraordinary sessions, at times uncannily other-worldly sounding, considering they’re being created by individuals in enforced, distant isolation. Tracks alternate with commentary on how they achieved it – through “necessity and happenstance,” as Bancroft puts it. Guests include trumpeter Laura Jurd with a forceful opener, Byron Wallen’s trumpet and Kershaw’s sax flurry around each other in Swing out of Latency while there’s a haunting collaboration with Dutch cellist Ernst Reijseger. Other guests include saxophonist Denys Baptiste and vibraphonist Corey Mwamba, there’s a lovely duo between saxophonist Iain Ballamy and Caribé while, from Japan, Satoki Fujii and Natsuki Tamura despatch eerie, free-form piano and trumpet sounds over Bancroft’s drum groove, 6,000 miles away. Jim Gilchrist