Eight years later, Ms. Gibbons has returned with her first solo effort, Out of Season (Go Beat/Universal), a non-trippy, non-hoppy album that, despite its title, arrives precisely at that autumnal moment when one is compelled to spin a somber Joan Baez record and mope around the flat with a cigarette burning in the ashtray.

The black-and-white cover photograph captures the essence here: Hair tussled in the wind, eyes wincing into eternity, Ms. Gibbons has the stark glamour of a dead poetess.

Out of Season is an exploration of 70’s folk, soul and jazz. And after Eminem and the retro-racket of Garageville—don’t get me wrong, I love those White Stripes—this is exactly what is called for: a hushed soundtrack to a weekend cottage on a fog-draped moor. Ms. Gibbons shares a title credit with a fellow named Rustin Man, a.k.a. Paul Webb, the former bassist of post-rock band Talk Talk, who produced and arranged. Here, he smartly eschews 90’s-era electronica—the blips and squiggles that torture Radiohead records and now date Portishead’s output—for a stripped-down folk-jazz ΰ la Joni Mitchell and Nick Drake, with a considerable nod to the queen of that sort of thing, Nina Simone.

The album is so spare and haunting—fingers rustling over acoustic-guitar strings, Ms. Gibbons’ nicotine-stained breath bathing the mike—you can almost see the staff notes laid bare on the sheet music.

The first track, "Mysteries," is a devastating piece of work. Accompanied by an acoustic guitar and a quavery chorus of backup singers, Ms. Gibbons warbles, "God knows how I adore life / When the wind turns on the shores lies another day." Her voice is so chilling, you’ll have to don a wool sweater just to listen to it.

With its misty sentiment and odd word enjambment, that first lyric casts its shadow across all 44 minutes of the record. Throughout, Ms. Gibbons recalls "water coloured memories / soft as a summer’s breeze" ("Sand River") and makes weird, soft-focus observations like "time is but a memory / beautiful for some / feathered like a majorette / in a rose unsaid and done" ("Spider Monkey").

"Tom the Model" follows "Mysteries," showing off Mr. Webb’s uncanny grasp of retro production. He sets the scene for Ms. Gibbons’ breathy torch-soul singing (a fatalistic cry to a lost lover) with a shimmery guitar, a sunburst organ swell and a tempered R&B horn section that brings to mind mid-70’s Al Green. Grandiose violins soar up and down, a tiny blast of blues harmonica comes out of nowhere, and Ms. Gibbons has you firmly by the lapels.

From there, things mellow out considerably, with Ms. Gibbons sticking closer to the somnambulist folk of Mr. Drake. By track eight, she comes clean with her obsession: "Drake" seems to be an ode to the fallen folky. Ms. Gibbons is adept at inhabiting any number of stylized voices and occasionally morphs into her heroes: the fragile, quavery falsetto of Joan Baez or, in the case of "Romance," the feline purr of Billie Holiday. Depending on your tolerance for this sort of thing, doing Holiday can come off as schticky or affected. But Ms. Gibbons’ shapeshifting is subtle enough—and the music inventive and fetching enough—that she avoids falling into pure hommage.