According to the promotional spiel, Fly Yellow Moon was ‘written over a 12-month period in snatched moments after sound checks and before nights out’. Much as I feel bad for saying it, this does explain a lot. Opening track ‘When You Walk in the Room’ conveniently captures both everything that’s good about this album as well as everything that’s not. The instrumentation is striking; the subsequent jangling piano chords joyful; Dangerfield’s vocals tinged with the ecstatic confidence of a natural and expressive singer desperate to convey pent-up happiness. And then, inexplicably, the song just goes nowhere. At all. Instead, it procrastinates for three lifeless minutes, endlessly repeating the same riffs, decent though they are.

First single ‘She Needs Me’ is the best the album has to offer, opening with a ‘Billie Jean’ drumbeat that gives way to a fantastic string-laden chorus, sounding halfway between the best of Robbie Williams’ most upbeat blathering and an amalgamation of every Christmas No. 1 you’ve ever heard. ‘Livewire’ also deserves praise. Both laid- and stripped- back, it sounds akin to the best of Death Cab and best captures Dangerfield’s easy and authentic sentimentality.

But considering the artist’s pedigree, many of the songs are let-downs. Second track ‘So Brand New’ is, quite frankly, fucking turgid and sounds dispiritingly similar to the equally morose ‘High on the Tide’. ‘Firebird’ is the most interesting track, with Dylan-esque chords becoming the vehicle for a brooding and melodic take on the nursery rhyme ‘Daisy, Daisy’. It’s a unique, solitary gem on an album otherwise adrift upon a sea of its own mediocrity, but – let’s face it – ‘Daisy, Daisy’ wasn’t the most mind-blowing of nursery rhymes. And whilst it obviously won’t bother many, it’s worth noting that, without exception, all the songs sound like they could be Guillemots tracks. There’s absolutely nothing to markedly differentiate them from anything that Fyfe’s cohort have given us before, except perhaps that the worst culprits, all mentioned above, are too boring for the rest of the Guillemots to tolerate having to play.

Ultimately, these are ten songs that glimmer with promise and never deliver. Most of them sound like Guillemots B-Sides, replete with the Dangerfield’s unswervingly positive poetry, but devoid of the spark that gave life to epics like ‘Trains to Brazil’. What’s worse is that Fly Yellow Moon is not actually all that bad – it may even be good - and that the stroppy tone of this review is mostly down to the sheer disappointment of the reviewer. But, really, we were expecting better from the man behind Guillemots.