It would be a mistake to describe Deer Tick as a one trick pony. After six years in the game and still without a trick to their name, this is a band content to circle the same old pastures of their ancestors without so much as a cheeky hoof out of place.

From top to tail of this plodding third album from the most predictable alt-country rockers under 30, one can’t help feeling that frontman John McCauley must be as bored of his own voice as we are. While it is often remarked that McCauley’s gravelly bear whine belies his 24 years, few give due attention to the unrelenting nasal raspiness or the fact that, at age 24, McCauley has relatively little to whine about. Not content to merely say what he sees when he can screech it like a caniform for extra emphasis, McCauley’s throat may be raw, but these songs are not.

‘When She Comes Home’ plods through a rhyming cattle train of done-me-wrong cliches: “Those things I want to say, they will go unspoken always” follows “Not so much as a kiss goodbye, I’m not gonna think of the reasons why” and the pained rendition of bare-bones guitar ballad ‘Piece by Piece and Frame by Frame’ sounds more like a chicken being torn limb from limb than the devastating fallout of rejection. Hearing Deer Tick’s straightforward take on loving and losing amounts to about as much as, should such a thing exist, a Cliffs Notes Study Guide for Life – it definitely makes sense but it’s a bit simple and you’ve probably heard it somewhere before.

He has got a talent for pushing buttons in all the right soft squidgy places. Neat elegy by numbers ‘Goodbye Dear Friend’ aims straight for the tear ducts with some Elton John piano. ‘Sad Sun’ appropriates the same semi-ironic brightness as any weepy Natalie Portman/Zooey Deschanel indie flick, or worse, the non-ironic cosiness of a Toy Story theme song. Either way though, it’s the grating sound of decades past.

Centrally placed buffer track ‘Mange’, which may as well be pitchforked straight from the Sweet Home Alabama soundtrack, signposts all that is wrong with this stagnating shitpile of songs – a middle of the road cross-country car tune so pedestrian that despite the token Led Zeppelin-esque guitar solo, it wouldn’t suffice the bus route to work let alone a Kerouac epic. Rarely is such an inoffensive easy-listening record so impossible to listen to.