But these imperfections seem almost besides the point; perfection doesn’t seem to be the goal here, or even necessarily completion.

The low-fi purity of the album evokes a young painter’s sketchbook, prepared by the eager apprentice as he learns to see through others’ eyes before truly exercising his own.

The sparse instrumentation, as fundamental as a wax pencil drawing or a series of black and white engravings, perfectly reflects his aesthetic.

Besides his versatile guitar, elegant voice and some muted percussion, the only other sound source on the album is a mournful trumpet.

Its surprise appearance on the album’s resonant closing track, “Broken Arrows,” seems to mark out a kind of elegiac ending to the extended daydream of “Veneer.”

The sun sets, “Taps” is played, and the collaged inhabitants of José González’s sonic dreamworld, halfway between the frozen North and the turbid South, wave him on his way, out into a promising artistic life of his own fashioning.

—Staff writer Will B. Payne can be reached at payne@fas.harvard.edu.