An intimate interior vision, Fables arrives in the autumn two years on from Kaikoura (earlier albums were 2011’s Migration a year after their self-titled debut) Girls in Airports opting to change label this time around from Mawimusic to Edition, home to fellow Dane Jasper Høiby’s trio Phronesis.

Recorded in a Copenhagen studio as recently as March this year, with tunes by saxophone frontman Martin Stender and the band – the other guys are saxist/clarinettist Lars Greve, keyboardist Mathias Holm, beat-eater percussionist Victor Dybbroe and drummer Mads Forsby – the album opens with slowly clanking percussion and a little emotive Ethiojazz-type saxophone motif curling along as an appetiser, the band never shy to embrace a scrap of a melody complete with a glaze of accompaniment behind them, the squall of saxophone moving never typically into the more ecstatic realm, the treated rhythmic backing bin-lid flexible, the tune tugging into a pavement trip-up of a thing.

‘Sea Trail’ zigzags percussively until sax comes in, this theme more quizzical and slow like a character study in a spy film that stops off after the initial foray to then tick like a clock to tease out time and space. Clearly a band not afraid to make you wait, all instrumental but yet sotto voce enough to resemble a private conversation you can’t avoid overhearing.

Nearly all the tracks are quite short (the longest just under six minutes) yet the band pack a lot into each tune because the compositions have a firm shape and conjure immersive emotional response. How much overdubbing went on is anyone’s guess. Live the band don’t sound massively different.

‘Randall’s Island’ the third tune and longest of all is achingly slow, what sounds like marimba (or another similar African percussion instrument) makes this more of a head bobber as it unfolds and for the first time really kit drummer Forsby starts chopping things up, like the Tom Skinner role maybe in London band Sons of Kemet. Girls in Airports ought to appeal to Sons of Kemet fans partly because of the Ethio influences although these are much less pronounced than on earlier albums and there is a lot less energy but that’s, presumably, deliberate.

Stender particularly has more of a Mark Lockheart-type Polar Bear-like style than the more combustible Shabaka Hutchings Kemet all-out assault yet it’s in group-think where Fables gets really interesting on this track as all the players criss-cross with anecdotes of their own to relate, a swirl of complementary points of view, the salty clashes and half-formed musical sentences ellipses of the mind, the sense that development and experimentation is all and everything is in transition.

‘Mammatus’ fourth up is more of an arpeggiated dream sequence, keyboardist Mathias Holm encouraging saxophone to inhabit a bittersweet space. Quite a melancholic courageous sound, certainly most so on this track, the spatial element with its organic rotor-like drums the work of a tumble of hands towards the end. ‘Aftentur’ is blissed out momentarily but sax(es) take the listener by the hand to lead the band into private musical spaces that bypass introspection somehow and make this more of a rite of passage. It chills out and could go into an electronica world here but holds back, again keeping the tempo really slow, the squalling controlled Pharoah-esque sax touches heightening the effect.

‘Aeiki’ has a glacial intensity to it with its textural beginning that somehow after about 70 seconds via saxes and the sound mix fashions a tintinnabulation effect you can’t quite locate in the swirl as instruments, fundamentally tools to expression via composition through improvisation, lose their identity in the fluid mix...

...and then there’s a sense of epic release on ‘Dovetail.’ A band that doesn’t go in for running the changes or playing bebop or unpacking a lot of elaborate individual soloing, take on board too that there’s no specified bass instrument at all. Keyboardist Holm opens ‘Yola’ with a kind of Schubertian ave maria, the soft saxophone footsteps becoming the guide again, saliva-laden and emotive a counterpoint to the distant sense of numinous mystery to the tune warmed then by the marimba-type percussion.

Fables apparently in the title is a nod to ‘Fables of Faubus’ which the band were listening to when they made this record. But there’s no Mingusian musical quotation or at least anything obvious, just a borrowing of the word and hat tip to workshop experimentation and risk taking. There’s more of an insistence and sense of urgency on ‘Aeiki’, above, but so much control too: will the tune explode into a feverish dance or not, part of the drama of the tune? ‘Episodes’ at the end is the band at their most psychological and deepest, the energy of the album curling up into a ball... the big commercial drum beat a complete surprise when it comes in, the band sheltering in the sense of emotional rescue. Stephen Graham