HERE are two understated albums that drift like a long summer’s day so perhaps it is of no great concern that we let them slip by last year. Both will reward your patience in their mutual slacker reflections on the English way of life.

Halstead should be more cherished than he is, not so much for his nascent psychedelic steps in the wrongly derided Thames Valley shoe-gazers Slowdive, but for the cosmic country rock of Mojave 3. Now he has settled for the bearded quiet life at Newquay, mixing surfing with writing leisurely, beautifully bucolic, hushed folk songs that sometimes evoke the strange world of Syd Barrett. Join him in his neo-Barrett home.

The Accidental’s low-key debut is carried on an equally warm breeze. As the name hints, the group assembled through a series of chance encounters and happy accidents that brought together Tunng’s Sam Genders and The Memory Band’s Stephen Cracknell, later joined by The Bicycle Thieves’ Hannah Caughlin and singer-songwriter Liam Bailey. Recorded in Cracknell’s front room with a laptop and a couple of microphones, There Were Wolves is woozy psychedelic folk suffused with weird dreams, newly budded love and tipsy lust.