Post-rock is a notoriously tricky genre to get right, I’ve always found. Make your sound too heavy and it comes off as bad metal, dial down the loud parts and it ends up being meandering drivel. At best, you can end up sounding like the class swots Slint, Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky. At worst, you’ll sound like a Chapterhouse covers band. And so we come to Menendez (a name made for a post-rock act), a four-piece from Farnborough who have just released their first full-length album, the well-intentioned Apple for Teacher.

I say well-intentioned because while Menendez clearly have love for the music they play and its heritage, the album unfortunately suffers from being too in thrall to musical heroes, and combined with slightly off-the-beat playing and muddy production it doesn’t make for a particularly wonderful listen. Take, for example, ‘Androcles Begins to Regret His Initial Decision’. Great title aside, it sounds like any Louisville band you could care to name (Slint, Rodan, The Sonora Pine) and drags its feet for six minutes, not helped by double-tracked shoegaze vocals. There’s also ‘(I’m Fighting a Losing Battle) with HR’, which has mumbled vocals and – bizarrely – whistling and suffers from the drums being about two beats ahead of the meandering guitar lines.

There are, however, some fine moments that can give Menendez some future hope. ‘Seven Summers Old’ is truly lovely, floating along on Young Team chiming guitar and gorgeous shoegaze vocal harmonies (it actually could fit on a Slowdive record), and ‘Interrupted Monologue’ sounds a lot like early EITS with pummelling drums and delay-laden riffs. There’s also the triumphant ‘The God Particle’ which builds to a satisfying release, and half of album closer ‘In Breach of Nature’s Demise’ is great before it fades out and back up to reveal a “secret” track that turns out to be an improv jazz disaster.

The biggest problem with Apple for Teacher is that it really doesn’t need to have the vocals of singer/bassist Daniel Burroughs. None of the tracks, save ‘Seven Summers Old’, benefit from having singing and it detracts from some of the fine guitar work of Patrick Hopkins. Add to that the wonky production and lack of attention to detail, and the majority of the album comes off like a high-school band having an after-class jam.

Unless Menendez can sort out the little things first, there’s no point in them tackling the bigger aspects of the music industry – focusing on what they do best would be a start, then other things might fall into place. For now, Apple for Teacher has to be put down as a bit of a misstep.