Here’s some vaguely interesting and almost entirely Wikipedia-based background information for you. The (original) Scottish Enlightenment was one of the most intellectually rich periods in Scotland’s history. Dozens of great minds, including Robert Burns and Adam Smith (who’s better known now as the bloke on the back of twenty pound notes), conducted the majority of their work during this time. So, if their name’s anything to go by, you’d expect The Scottish Enlightenment’s latest album, St. Thomas, to be a bit of a masterpiece.

And it opens promisingly with the atmospheric instrumental ‘Gal Gal’, which is followed by the sparse guitars and subtle harmonies of the thoughtful, if slightly lengthy, ‘Earth Angel – With Sticks In Crypt’. ‘Little Sleep’ shakes things up a bit next, but its livelier, Interpol-esque guitar lines and infectious melodies are tactfully suppressed by the more restrained drums, avoiding any unwanted pervasion into clichéd ‘rock-out’ territory.

Unfortunately though, it’s all downhill from here. Despite glimmers of hope from the likes of the tranquil ‘Pascal’ and the opening bars of ‘The First Will Be The Last’, the remainder of the album becomes something of a quagmire of downbeat, slow-paced, drawn-out songs, none of which seem to progress very far after their initial sixty seconds or so. Until, that is, the bizarre fifty-second-long final track, ‘Cogito’, which is certainly different, but probably not for the right reasons. You know that bit in Walt Disney’s ‘The Aristocats’ where the kittens are jumping around on the piano, making a racket? Well, that’s what ‘Cogito’ sounds like, only slightly longer and not half as endearing.

Although tracks like ‘Little Sleep’ and ‘Pascal’ prove that The Scottish Enlightenment are more than capable of conjuring up interesting and intelligent melodies and arrangements, there just isn’t enough variation on St. Thomas to make it genuinely captivating. Sure, each song has its merits, but you can’t help but feel that The Scottish Enlightenment are suffering from a lack of imagination here, which renders the album slightly monotonous and, frankly, a bit dull. If variety really is the spice of life, St. Thomas is sadly left floundering somewhere near the lower regions of the Nando’s ‘Peri-ometer’.