Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly. - Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly.

It’s a dangerous game to play, to fuse a mass of styles together in one album, in the manner in which Sam Duckworth and his band of merry men attempt on this, their third album. Where the intention might have been to create something wonderfully eclectic, seamlessly held together by Sam’s distinct vocals, the result is a bit of a mess, the attempt to fuse genre after genre after genre rapidly wearing on the listener.

Where the album works is in the stripped down acoustic numbers, like opener ‘Hand Me Downs’, which is a gem of a track, and later on in the album, ‘The Plot’. But in the interim, we have to suffer ‘Collapsing Cities’, with it’s horn section and drum machine, which comes across as fairly contrived. ‘Night Life’ sounds like it’s a knowing wink and a croon away from being on a Divine Comedy album, and lacking Neil Hannon’s charm, falls flat, and ‘All Of This Is Yours’, with guest vocalist Baaba Maal is a turgid attempt at world music fused with electronica, accompanied by the same riff on a guitar over and over.

It’s just a bit tiring.

Moreover, the majority of tracks appear to have been littered with an ill-fitting and ill-conceived drum ‘n’ bass-esque drum machine, leaving us with an album sounding so dated it is hard to believe that it’s not four or five years old.

Whilst there is a sense of an artist moving forward and clearly, that’s to be applauded, the lack of cohesion and the over-production evokes the sensation that something has been lost in the studio. It’s an album full of ideas, but ideas that have been given such a sheen and polish that they’ve lost any charm or originality they may have possessed in the first instance. It’s not so much a school report reading ‘must try harder’ that we’re left mulling over, but rather one asking Duckworth to instead, try a little less.