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Every newly emerging guitar hotshot needs a USP. Dan Patlansky’s is that he comes from South Africa, a place not renowned as a nursery for modern-vintage bluesman. But you wouldn’t know it from his transatlantic rasp, or the warm Midwestern take on the genre that constitutes this follow-up to 2016’s Introvertigo.

Patlansky’s supple guitar wraps itself around warm-bodied electric piano on Never Long Enough, and Eyes jerks and grinds over a bass line that will have Stevie Wonder on the phone asking if he can have it back. The odd dime-a-dozen blues plodder (Judge A Man) is offset by the all-axes-blazing high point Dog Day. The net result is undeniably good, but falls short of greatness.

Dave Everley has been writing about and occasionally humming along to music since the early 90s. During that time, he has been Deputy Editor on Kerrang! and Classic Rock, Associate Editor on Q magazine and staff writer/tea boy on Raw, not necessarily in that order. He has written for Metal Hammer, Louder, Prog, the Observer, Select, Mojo, the Evening Standard and the totally legendary Ultrakill. He is still waiting for Billy Gibbons to send him a bottle of hot sauce he was promised several years ago.