Sweet Baboo/Sparrowhawks at Telford's Warehouse, Chester

The jetlag from my experiences in the States with The Joy Formidable hasn't abated. I'm very fuzzy-headed and can't quite fathom where I am and who I am about to see. This isn't a great state of mind to operate under when you're the promoter of the gig.

Sparrowhawks are from Deeside and Llangollen in north east Wales. I've eulogised them previously on these pages. I mentioned Pentangle and Fairport Convention - two over-used comparisons here at the tail-end of a folk revival that has dulled to conservatism many aspects of 'modern music'.

The arena-busting success of Mumford & Sons, for example, has given the acoustic guitar and an impassioned vocal all of the cutting edge of Phil Collins' shiny pate.

Thankfully, Sparrowhawks have much more guile. They aren't plagiaristic strummers, hacking through chord sequences long since shorn of bite. They shimmer and confound easy expectations with a musical dexterity that's very rare round these parts. Round any parts. There's a distinct West Coast/Laurel Canyon vibe, but not something contrived or unconvincing considering where the band actually originate.

If Burt Bacharach came from Bagillt, this might have been the sound of his house band. And that's pretty high praise. There are echoes of early Carole King [Snow Queen]; Shack's appropriation of West Coast sunshine pop; Love, even.

It's a great sound: the harmonies are bold and illuminating; the melodies memorable; the lyrics clever: "your safety net is empty where your beating heart should be..."

They're a special band - and they pull off their second gig as a full band with great aplomb.

I also rather like the fact that they look like kids from north east Wales. No one in the band has tried to approximate a stetson, a leather waistcoat or a bullhorn belt buckle. This bodes well. Truly.

Before my trip to the States, friends from Chester had been stopping me in the street asking me when Sweet Baboo was playing. This is unfamiliar territory for me. I tend to put artists on that no one has ever heard of - and, thus, have an experience of promoting that is synonymous with pushing a large, well-oiled boulder up the precipitous side of a very icy glacier.

Sweet Baboo, however, has achieved a certain prominence through nothing more melodramatic or mysterious than great, individual songwriting. His excellent third album, Ships, is out now on the influential Moshi Moshi record label - and it's very much an improved continuation of his first two albums, Hello Wave (2009) and I'm A Dancer/Songs About Sleepin' (2011).

Ships - and it's excellent lead singles, If I Died, Would You Remember Me? and Let's Go Swimming Wild - has earned significant airplay, especially on 6 Music and Radio Wales (not just my graveyard shift show, either) which goes some way to explaining why people are increasingly aware of his work.

Steve (as Sweet Baboo is known to his folks) has a classically trained background and has been an important musical gun for hire for artists of the calibre of Cate Le Bon, Euros Childs and Slow Club, for some years now.

That musicality suffuses his work rather than defines it. Ships, for example, is a very horny album - in a multitude of senses. And although Steve hasn't brought the horns with him tonight, he has brought an excellent, stripped down band featuring Avvon Chambers (drums) and Rob 'Voluntary Butler Scheme' Jones (bass).

Their artistry is knowing when to play. In fact, the arrangements are a wonderful testament to the band's confidence in the strength of Steve's songs. And - for once - it is well-placed confidence.

The set starts with The Morse Code For Love Is Beep Beep, Beep Beep, The Binary Code Is One One. It sets the precedence for the rest of the night: clever words begetting snagglesome melodies which in turn beget joyous smiles amongst the audience.

The humour in the songs is a gallows humour for the heart. It sounds like Steve's heart has more cracks in it than Humpty Dumpty's post-wall backside. Each crack has let a song shine through - and the empathetic power of those songs, the fact that we all know what a broken heart feels like but can't express it half-so-well as Steve does - is why the light from those cracks is radiated back from every face in the audience.

They're not all songs of loss. He sings a paean to friendship - Cate's Song - which, I'm certain, has us all thinking about our best friends, and all those formative experiences, that made such friendships the ones that counted.

He tells us he used to come to Chester as a day out from his childhood home in Colwyn Bay.

And then he encores with a new song about wanting to buy a Volkswagen Camper Van, and another track from Ships (12 Carrots Of Love) that underlines he and his band's versatility. It descends into occasional psychedelic freakout. Steve does a strange dance on one leg - half man, half flamingo. The lead comes out of his guitar and the set slips over to a halt.

But it's OK. It's more than OK. In fact it was a gig I'll be trying to remember the flavour of for as long as tiny electrical pulses are prepared to dance across my cerebral cortex.