Authenticity can be a contentious concept. Jonathan Wilson, for example, is obviously a genuine part of the scene he purports to belong to. But there’s a problem. Wilson’s claimed the loose gathering of songwriters basking in the warm afterglow of the original hippie movement in the half urban, half rural idyll provided by the canyons of Los Angeles as his spiritual home. And that scene had pretty much fizzled out by the time the multi-instrumentalist was born in North Carolina in 1974, derailed by hard drugs, even harder quantities of cash and various maladies the free and easy-living, often immensely wealthy musicians tended to be powerful magnets to.

To some, this uncompromising ambition to channel the spirit of an era Wilson could only have participated in first-hand with the aid of a fully functioning time machine presents a huge obstacle to taking Gentle Spirit seriously. Not that the contents of Wilson’s first properly released album initially put up much of a fight against those doubting its value and intentions. Looking like the gold medal winner in the Neil Young (circa Harvest) lookalike contest, Wilson – renowned both as a producer and guitar ace serving the likes of Jackson Browne and Dawes – isn’t content with merely embarking on a reference-dropping retro trip. Every note and utterance contained on Gentle Spirit is as immersed in the ethos of the era Wilson’s influenced by as is possible without having actually shared a joint with David Crosby on Sunset Strip around 1971. Decidedly old school lyrics of the back-to-the-garden variety such as “natural world needs our energy” (‘Waters Down’) that combine an appreciation of natural wonders with an emphasis on the communal ‘we’ as opposed to the navel-gazing ‘me’ favoured by vast majority of songwriters for the last four decades, delivered entirely straight-faced, are potent baits for mockery. Many of the song titles – ‘Magic Everywhere’, ‘Natural Rhapsody’, ‘Rolling Universe’ – suggest a wholehearted endorsement of values that went out of style around the time irony was invented. At 78 minutes, Gentle Spirit’s modelled on vintage double vinyl epics with gatefold sleeves tailor-made for preparing produce for certain recreational pursuits. Which is quite appropriate considering that Wilson and co (including personnel from Vetiver, The Jayhawks, The Black Crowes and Steve Miller Band) sound baked well past the point where time becomes a flexible concept throughout the album, as tracks routinely plod well beyond the five-minute mark and tempos stick doggedly to laidback sluggishness.

Add up all of the above, and it’s temptingly easy to suspect it’s all a conceptual joke, a hipster satire ridiculing the – with hindsight – naively idealistic musical templates and social mores of a bygone era. But – and this is one big but – it’s precisely this determination to go fully ‘method’ on the time-travelling trip, even when the stubborn refusal to acknowledge that it’s in fact 2011 instead of 1971 takes the proceedings to the edge of unintentional parody, that ultimately turns Gentle Spirit into a gem. Faced with an endless onslaught of ironic nods towards the past and transient micro-genres that attract more column inches than actual listeners during their brief reign, it’s refreshing to come across an album this steadfastly immune to shifting fashions, crafted by a musician who’s audibly sincere in his devotion to recreate a slice of the musical past he feels a real kinship with.

The fact that the music’s for the most part excellent helps. A self-confessed scholar of ‘Canyon culture’, Wilson’s played an integral part in re-establishing a musical community in Los Angeles’ legendary musicians’ and filmmakers’ enclave Laurel Canyon. But Wilson’s not limited to echoing either the painstakingly polished harmonies of Laurel Canyon’s most famous troubadours Crosby, Stills and Nash or the unshaven looseness of neighbouring Topanga Canyon’s most famous past resident Neil Young, as most backwards-gazing songwriters would wound up doing. Gentle Spirit’s easygoing charm – even the one uptempo cut, a backwoods funk-fuelled cover of Gordon Lightfoot’s ‘The Way I Feel‘, appears decidedly heavy-lidded – is frequently muddled by an undercurrent of troubled contemplation familiar from such blues-riddled, loose late-night masterpieces as David Crosby’s If I Could Only Remember My Name and Neil Young’s On The Beach, even if the protagonist on tunes as such as ‘Can We Really Party Today?’ sounds too horizontal to actually take any sort of action to address their concerns. Various points of reference crop up: a drop of ‘Southern Man’-esque boogie here, a nod towards the smokier moments of Roy Harper amidst the blissful glide of ‘Canyons in the Rain’, ‘Valley of the Silver Moon’s generously portioned Crazy Horse crunch, the rippling duelling guitars of Grateful Dead that power the gently galloping highlight ‘Desert Raven’. Even so, the results dodge derivative mimicry with rare ease, with organic spontaneity coexisting harmoniously with quietly complex arrangements – starring some unmistakably contemporary production tricks – that gradually turn what is on first encounters a uniformly sleepy listen into a richly textured treat.

It has its problems – the middle of the generously portioned album sags, and the odd moment of absurdly extended noodling suggests Wilson may need to invest in stopwatch or risk losing any sense of momentum. Place Gentle Spirit in a musical identity parade alongside its vintage counterparts, and the album could easily pass off the as the thing it’s setting out to emulate: a long-lost early 70’s LA cosmic singer-songwriter double vinyl opus. Almost without exception, overt retro trips such as this one carry a whiff of distance, of old tricks learned by rote rehashed by musicians who don’t have firsthand connection to their source material and are fully aware of this lack. Gentle Spirit has none of this. As such, it’s about as close as it’s possible to get to the genuine article at such a distance, providing Wilson with a convincing counterargument to accusations of inauthenticity from any musical guardians of ‘realness’.