The Empty Vessels are a hard-workin’, hard-sweatin,’ no-foolin’ blues-rock band, whose last EP sounded an awful lot like some of Free’s less nuanced numbers, but which had muscle and heart and guts. The follow-up, curiously named after a piece of Whitney Houston movie escapism, is patchy and inferior.

In general, the technical stuff is still there – hefty guitar riffs, a big-bottomed rhythm section and Matt Greenham’s trademark bullish bellow – but the tunes are more laboured and negligible than their last effort. ‘Once A King’ opens with a rather clever amalgamation of The Beatles’ ‘Come Together’ and Free’s ‘Mr Big’ and develops a slow, smoking groove, but its melodies are rudimentary and don’t bear repeat listening. ‘Consolers Of The Lonely Night’ suffers from the Oxford ailment of too many pointless time changes (the Empty Vessels will never, please God, become a post-rock band) while ‘Stand In Line’, undoubtedly the strongest tune on the record with its echoes of QOTSA’s ‘No-One Knows’, is plagued by unusually poor singing from Greenham. Okay, okay, I know that rock singers, especially tough, blue-collar ones like Matt, don’t want to sound like Joe McElderry (for those that don’t know, he’s the cruise-ship crooner of choice for the sort of little old ladies who find Will Young too edgy) but too many slightly flat high notes eventually start to grate. He’s got the chops to pull these songs off, so best put in the takes.

There’s a nice surprise on ‘Ain’t Got The Time’, featuring as it does an undoubtedly leather-jacket-wearing rock chick growling along harmoniously with Greenham on the choruses, but overall the songs feel disjointed and short on inspiration. It’s far too harsh to churn out the old line about the empty vessel making the loudest noise, but if this record were a steak, you’d be sending it back with a request for a lot more flavour and a bit less gristle.