Time Travel – already the second full-length from 20-year-old Londoner Alessi Laurent-Marke – comes in at a mere 28 minutes. Even so, it may take a fair few spins before you get around to hearing tracks eleven and twelve. Not because the record is so utterly dull and laborious that it’s all your attention can muster. Not at all, in fact. It’s more of a case of the album being so delectably comforting your mind has trouble staying alert in its company. By the time you awake, nape aching from the pressure of the headboard, more necessary tasks will inevitably need attending. Quite bizarre really given that Time Travel is a much more direct set of songs than 2008 debut Notes From The Treehouse.

We should probably stop making note of the prolificacy of these exciting young things – such as Alessi’s Ark – given the frequency of such happenings. Well, that, coupled with the resentment of one’s talents (or lack of) alongside the boundless creativity of said artists. However, such is the pace at which they manage to buffer those woolly parts, it’s difficult not to marvel. If that sentence appears ever-so-slightly twee, it’s because Alessi can do that to you. You’re lucky I’m not lifting lines straight from my notes, where phrases like: “This is perfect for a naughty afternoon nap” have ineffably (or so I thought) been jotted. In justification, any album that incorporates the human whistle – see the title track and ‘The Bird Song’ – can create an uncharacteristically quaint mindset in the worst of us.

It’s rare, though, that a record evoking such cordiality contains such immediate hooks. Laurent-Marke’s candied and wobbly tones wash over you with such ease and elegance it’s easy to forget to define them as such. I guess they are necessary given that only two tracks waltz on over the three-minute mark. Such quality control is one of a number of features which emphasise a new-found maturity to Alessi’s music, as eye-rollingly obvious as that sounds. If I am to be ultra-critical, perhaps Time Travel is too cohesive for its own good. As pedantry as some might claim it to be, nothing quite stimulates an unbridled emotive response – although the gooey sentiment that makes up both ‘Kind of Man’ and ‘On the Plain’ don’t fall far short. I must say, such fault-finding – albeit fairly negligible – doesn’t sit particularly easy here, with Alessi doing her level best to re-energise those ill-treated eardrums. Just you try and pause for thought on songs like ‘Wire’ and ‘Blanket’ and try to conjure up the slightest amount of acrimony.