It's enough to get a man as frustrated as all hell. There is obviously a brilliantly talented individual at work here, yet every attempt at grabbing the listener by the neck and saying "Listen up now, motherfucker, this is some funky shit", is immediately smacked to blazes by another sickeningly saccharine arrangement, another swelling orchestral interlude.

That lead single, Closest Thing To Crazy, is like something you would imagine hearing at the end of Beauty And The Beast. It's not too hard to imagine Belle running around some CGI staircases with some animated cutlery, singing about "How can you treat me like a child, yet like a child I yearn for you?"

The moody cover image of the songwriter brandishing an acoustic guitar and bathed in densest black could cause one to imagine that what constitutes these 40-odd minutes of musical shenanigans might be something folky, something a little rough, a little gritty, like Gillian Welch perhaps. All your gonna hear, though, is what Simon Cowell might refer to as "Musical Wallpaper". It doesn't particularly want to unsettle you when you're trying to open that bottle of wine or discuss The Journals Of Bridget Jones, it just wants to be there in the background, tinkering away from one predictable note to the next, never offering any surprises or any hint that a song might take a direction you hadn't been expecting since five seconds into the first verse.

The charm of many of Eva Cassidy's recordings owes something to the fact that she simply couldn't afford to have, say, The Irish Film Orchestra bounding across her every syllable. There was an endearing ruggedness to those recordings, a sensation evocative of hearing the sound of daylight piercing through a room shrouded in cigarette smoke and whiskey breath.

Eva Cassidy was a remarkable singer, and a fine interpreter of songs on occasion, but there was nothing so extraordinary that you couldn't imagine hearing it in at least three pubs in any given city on a Saturday night.

The same applies to Call Off The Search.

Sometimes, though, you wish you hadn't been paying so much damn attention, that it was just something crawling along the ambience of a yack-heavy room. When you actually pick up some of the things being said, it's enough to make a man faint with awe at the stunning daftness of it all.