A butcher and a slave trader he might have been, but Sir Francis Drake was undoubtedly a man of derring-do and one possessed of a great sense of adventure. As such, you’d like to think The Drakes might be explorers of music’s outer reaches, perhaps unearthing previously unheard aural spices and making musical gold.

Sadly, they sound pretty much like every other blokey guitar band of the past 20 years.

Opener ‘What Do I Know’ at least has a lightness of touch, a rough-edged if generic jangle helmed by a voice with just a hint of plaintiveness about it. The singer fails to carry a tune though, cracking up when he gets anywhere need a high note, and the whole thing settles into a pedestrian strum until it almost plucks up some Dutch courage at the death.

‘Wormwood’ ups the pace, meatier and more laddish, jangle ditched in favour of proper guitar rocking, extended solo and all, but ultimately it could be a lost B-side from Oasis’ third or fourth album. Ditto ‘Rain Or Shine’, a song that people who like bands because Paul Weller recommended them might consider a sensitive love ballad. It’s not bad as such, just staid and comfortable, a musical pair of slightly worn check-pattern slippers.

Perhaps the best song here is the final one, ‘Don’t Let the Streets Walk You Home’, partly because it sounds like the emotion in it is more genuine and not knocked out by proxy, and also because the tunes and harmonies are more delicately handled, sounding closer to 80s sensitive young fellas like Lloyd Cole or Martin Stephenson; but even here you’re left with precious little to take with you once it’s finished.

So, we guess The Drakes aren’t named after the great British explorer of the 16th Century, a man who circumnavigated the globe and fought off the Spanish Armada, but instead after a male duck, one content to float around in its small, safe pond with little awareness of a bigger, more exciting and dangerous world beyond. Here you go chaps, have a piece of bread. Sliced white, obviously.