It’s not good. It’s not bad. Like most albums, there’s a good song or two, a hit or two but many misses. It’s like in Battleship when you hit an enemy’s boat, and then spend the next too many turns trying to guess what spot you actually hit. They come as they are billed, an old-fashioned bar rock band. Think the big brothers of the Hold Steady. But the singer has a knack for sounding exceedingly like Elvis Costello, and when he makes it works for him, it turns those tracks into the album’s highlights. It’s not surprising that Nick Hornby has such a huge manbone for them.

“Blue But Cool” nearly channels Punch the Clock era Costello, a ballad about restlessness, and is followed by “Jesus in the Temple”, a clearly Beatles-inspired English soul hootenanny. These two songs offer the 8-minute cream filling in the 47-minute Oreo. The Britpop theme follows through most of the album up until the last two songs. “Can’t Take It with You” pulls the clever trick of having a sing-along chorus in major keys during a song about dying and going to Hell. It works.

The majority of the songs are crafted such that you can immediately determine the inspirations for them, but the inspirations are not used as stepping stones; instead, aspirations. They seem to want to be as good as other music was. I guess that’s where the stigma of being a bar band plays into the equation. This is music for drinking and remembering. The only shame is that it’s really not worth remembering.