Sometimes all we need is music that satisfies our basic needs, without pushing the envelope very much. The Donkeys, a band with a name that immediately suggests a lack of innovation, give the listener just that. Sophomore album Born With Stripes won’t win any awards from from the more leftfield magazines or websites, but yet there’s something about its unrefined charms that really appeals.

A dusty psych-rock record that pulls as much from the likes of The Byrds and The Grateful Dead as it does from Pavement or Black Lips, it’s a hommage to FM rock music listened to on a crackly radio, in a battered convertible, on a highway pointed straight to the beach. The San Diego foursome might be hitherto best known as being the men behind Geronimo Jackson, the fictional band featured in Lost, who were apparently peers of The Grateful Dead – and that’s a decent place to start to contextualise their music.

Born With Stripes is music made by slacker mystics who aren’t afraid of looking backwards for inspiration, and they kick off with the chiming ‘Don’t Know Who We Are’, sounding like a lost Stephen Stills-penned Buffalo Springfield cut. It’s not going to win any awards for lyrical brilliance - ”I’m a boy, you’re a girl / you’re a universe, in my world” – but singer/drummer Sam Sprague sings it with such sincerity that it avoids becoming trite. ‘I Like the Way You Walk’ has potential to be a slacker anthem, channeling the spirit of Pavement through sterling guitar workouts.

‘Bloodhound’ slows things down and comes rather unstuck with a twangy western feel, before title track ‘Born With Stripes’ picks up the pace with a rather silly but enjoyable breakneck rattle through the Nuggets back catalogue in 1min 40secs. However, the danger of indulging in psych-rock is that a pointless hippy meandering is always just around the corner, and ‘Kaleidoscope’ delivers with talk of “Jupiter is on the right” and being “out here on my own / skippin’ like a stone’. The same frightening prospect could have continued with the worryingly-titled ‘West Coast Raga’ (you can almost smell the patchouli, can’t you?) but somehow The Donkeys contrive to make the sitar-drenched track sing with authenticity….seriously, I’m not on something as I write this.

The Cali natives hit their stride with the trio of ‘New Blue Stockings’, ‘Ceiling Tan’ and ‘Oxblood’, with all three having a confident swagger that lifts them away from being trad, dull rockers. Praise must go to Sprague for singing the line “I’ve never seen a girl with varicose hair”, on ‘Ceiling Tan’, with a straight face.

The album finishes strongly with ‘Bullfrog’, ‘Valerie’, and final track ’East Coast Raga’. The latter is a companion piece to the west coast version and clatters along with an electric verve similar to The Black Angels. It’s a thrilling close, and a pretty fine way to end proceedings.

As I said in opening, Born With Stripes appeals to simple tastes. It’s a classic rock record that wears its influences on its sleeve, but there’s really nothing wrong with that. If you want the avant-garde, look elsewhere, but for good times and good tunes, this’ll do just fine.