If you were already concerned about what’s happened to the spirit of hellraising rock’n’roll, then you would probably have a hernia being among this crowd. Sitting in neat rows in hushed quiet, they’re here to watch a band of classically trained, collegiate-looking chaps in smart sweaters play tidily complex pastoral dream-pop with choral harmonies. It’s not Iggy Pop.

And yet, with his bedroom-recorded debut album Architect, Glaswegian singer-songwriter and Royal Conservatoire of Scotland alumnus Christopher Duncan has made one of the smartest and most magical records of the year. Anyone who finds Vampire Weekend a bit la-de-da will be immune to the charms of a number such as He Believes in Miracles – an airy, nylon-stringed guitar strum in a complex time signature which sees Duncan hit a falsetto with the sweetness of a Franciscan choirboy to pronounce “somewhere the sun shines in my reverie for thee”.

But to deny the sophistication and purity of thought and craft that’s gone into these songs, which could be drawn from an alternative 1980s universe in which Peter Gabriel did an album for 4AD, would be churlish.

The jangling, sweeping Novices concludes with a lush a cappella passage, followed by breath of stunned silence before anyone seems to dare to applaud. Duncan sings harmonies with keys player Finn McCardel and bassist Lluis Solervicens like a barbershop chorus in a cathedral: it’s so exquisite they make Fleet Foxes sound tone deaf. Garden, contrastingly, whizzes past in a blur of krautrock beats and psych-rock guitar. As gossamer folk lullaby I’ll Be Gone By Winter is sung unamplified by Duncan and his backing singers as an encore, the audience practically holding their breaths so as not to mishear a note, you’re struck by how dizzyingly close to perfection his songs can float.

• At Farmfest, Somerset, 31 July, and Green Man festival, Brecon Beacons, 21 August.