As the Hall and Oates pastiche Burn For Me (actually Hall, Oates and The Pointer Sisters if we’re being totally accurate) pumps out of the speakers, you realise the usually dependable Night Flight Orchestra have reached track four on their new album without causing so much as a jiggle on your pomp rock overload detector. This has never happened before. Have the band, now on album six in their mission to make rolled up jacket sleeves cool again, finally run out of steam?

It’s hard not to come to that conclusion after repeated listens to Aeromantic II. Of course, it’s not horrible. NFO are not an organisation that includes that word in any of it’s mission statements. It’s just that, for the first time in my long and fruitful association with the band, I find there’s little to be found on this album to get actively hot and bothered about.

Of course, the surprise re-admission of Abba to the game has upped the stakes for anyone with an interest in hawking sleek, airbrushed disco rock to the masses; and here the glimmering Chardonnay Nights is the only track that might give Bjorn and Benny the odd palpitation. The band impress more with follow up track Change, a strident piece of bolshy AOR that really pounds the listener with it’s classy chorus and superb, suspenseful arrangement. Here, as the band head into Toto territory, you get the feeling that this might be the band’s most effective area of operation moving forward. Especially if newish Keyboardist John Lönnmayr continues to add his gargantuan skills to the band…

Amber Through A Window upholds the band’s fine tradition of using female names in it’s more memorable tracks, but after this strong triumvirate of tracks mid album, things fizzle out a little as the band meander their way to the album’s closing track, Moonlit Skies, which fuses an electro beat straight out of the Laura Brannigan playbook to some choppy, Survivorish guitars to at least end the album on a positive note.

You don’t really press play on a Night Flight Orchestra album with the expectation of being underwhelmed; unfortunately that’s just what happened to your reviewer with Aeromantic II. Of course, I’ll be back next time they release a record, but for now I don’t see AII featuring much on the Strickmann family stereo…

Aeromantic II is out now.