I wasn’t that sold on Danish yacht rockers Boys From Heaven when they released their glossy yet strangely unconvincing debut The Great Discovery, but, after a few lessons to their superb sophomore effort, The Descendant, I’m prepared to admit I may have got them all wrong. I still don’t like their moniker though…

Amusingly for a band so rooted in the ‘yacht’ movement they kick off album number two with a track called Sailing On; It’s good but not great, but, as the album wends it’s way through it’s brief slightly-over-half-an-hour runtime you realise that this is a band who really have found their stride and with it, their niche.

Whether it’s the superb mix by Eclipse‘s Eric Martensson or just the fact that they guys have grown into their roles as purveyors of superior West Coast-influenced music, the three songs that make up the core of this album – the Totoish Endless Love and Last Time, and the deliriously feelgood eighties melange that is Circles – are utterly convincing, to the point of actually making the listener think they’ve stumbled across something recorded in 1984 and heretofore unreleased.

The Dream is Gone is almost as good; the trick these guys have mastered here is that, despite the similarity of their sound to a host of long-lost eighties Gods, they never really end up sounding close enough to any of them to prompt catcalls and accusations of plagiary; They’ve taken the sound, the feel, of an era none of us who love this style of music want to lose touch with and they’ve formed it in their own image. And when Mads Schaumann lets fly on his trusty Charvel on The Dream… well, let’s just say if the sleeves on your jacket don’t hitch themselves up to your elbows on their own then you clearly just ain’t feelin’ what this band is channeling…

The semi-balladic Too Far Gone closes proceedings in a riot of Lukatheresque soloing and funky, Lionel Ritchie-meets-DeBarge-family fun, leaving a smile across your face sixty miles wide and clutching on to the notion that AOR might just have a new saviour… This is, as Chris Tarrant used to say that other venerated eighties icon Tiswas, what they want – indubitably!

The Descendant is out now.