Some bands are more than happy to jump through hoops to attract the listener’s attention. Others prefer to let the music do the talking. Holton’s Opulent Oog belong firmly in the latter category – and best replace ‘talking’ with ‘muttering’.

Keeping with the outfit’s 2008 debut, Love In The Mist provides twelve tracks of sleepy folk-rock peppered with mild touches of psychedelically hued haziness. Songwriter and mainstay Nick Holton’s songs are a relaxed bunch, more likely to engage in heavy-lidded contemplation than upping the tempo. Add to this Holton’s voice, a profoundly limited but warm instrument resembling a less depressed Leonard Cohen or sneer-free young Dylan, and you’ve landed with an album stuck in a perpetual Sunday afternoon after a long night heavy on the ale: defiantly one-dimensional and determined to do its own laidback thing, but also – provided the time is right for enjoying its woozy contents – extremely charming.

Diverse it is not. Slow-evolving tracks such as ‘In-between Curtains’ and ‘Into The Market’ rely on the same tools: Holton’s gently murmur intoning enigmatic lyrics touched with small-scale domestic drama and softly plucked guitar, Ian McCutcheon’s (ex Mojave 3) elemental drum beat, Roger Proctor’s violin and occasional flashes of downbeat trumpet, all riding the most unhurried of tempos, creating the impression of staring at a soft drizzle falling on an unkempt garden. Which is probably a good thing – speedier moments usually turn out much clumsier than their world-weary colleagues, the exception being the good-humoured chant-along ‘Chat About’ which deserves to be the most ramshackle surprise hit of 2011. Elsewhere, the lovely ‘Go Before You Strip Away My Mind’ brings to mind the less heavily orchestrated moments of Mercury Rev’s ‘Deserter’s Songs’.

All of which might sound like a recipe for inconsequential mumbling. However, if you don’t experience any kind of warming sensation when the tentative nylon stringed solo kicks in whilst a violin and what sounds like someone’s first flute lesson wail on towards the end of the title track’s resigned sigh, you’re in urgent need of defrosting.

Love In The Mist, then, isn’t an album prone to high octane exhibitionism or sudden fireworks displays. But not everything has to be.