In this reviewing lark, it’s always handy to give the reader a few signposts as to what they might expect to hear if they buy the album. There might be a hint of band A, a soupcon of singer B, the merest suspicion of act C, hopefully subsumed into the act’s own individual style.

But it’s a lot easier to pin Tom Ovans down: on every song here he sounds like late-period Bob Dylan, to a Stars in Their Eyes degree… except with a more destroyed voice, few interesting lyrics and the bleakest outlook I’ve ever encountered. Breakdown and Cry, Never Been in Love, Too Late Now… getting the picture yet?

To be fair, the cover is pretty cool in a primitivist way; there are odd blasts of melancholy Neil Young harmonica; and Ovans’ tales of working class Rust Belt life have a humanity reminiscent of Springsteen. But while Bruce often offers the hope of redemption, Ovans’ characters are damned from the beginning, shuffling through purgatorial landscapes of suffering – any sliver of hope the crueller when it is inevitably denied.

Get On Board was recorded in two days and is ultra-conservative, heartland rock in extremis, sticking pretty closely to a template of chugging country-rock with noodling electric guitar; and sparse, bleak acoustic ballads. Occasionally backing singers wail soulfully a la ‘Knocking On Heaven’s Door’ – and it’s so nice to hear someone who can sing, just for a second…

Dylan, Springsteen and Young can take these forms and create magic with them, but in lesser hands like Ovans’, they can sound wearyingly played out. Years of sweaty earnest blokes like this singing earnest hymns about hard toil makes you pine for freaky degenerates of indeterminate gender, covered in peacock feathers and creating the world’s most effete electro-pop.

The ballads come out better in general, while the Dylan worship peaks with ‘Western Plains Blues’ (’the whole world is burning / the rivers have run dry’). Apart maybe from ‘Rainbows’, which is quite a sweet tale of a working-class kid discovering the bohemian life, this is pretty thin gruel.

Sorry you’ve had such a hard time, Tom – and you’re probably a really nice bloke. But you’re just bringing the rest of us down…

Ben Wood