Apparently recorded on a whim, and on a single microphone, as a sideline to frontman Justin Kinkel Schuster’s former day job in indie rockers Theodore, Water Liars’ debut is a thrown-together thing that suffers not only from a violently horrible sleeve but also a terrible nonsense band name (they were called Phantom Limb, which remains the album title, and it’s hard not to wonder why they didn’t keep it as their moniker), yet comes out fairly well from the whole ordeal; if not smelling of roses exactly, then at least doused in the sweet scent of the bands to whom they bear most comparison, as well as offering a convincing enough warmth of its own.

We catch a little ’90s grunge with the Melvins’ wailing heft on opening riffola ‘100%’ but this misleading mask soon drops and, as relieved as we are to not be suffering through another ’90s retro-tribute album, we’re perhaps slightly dismayed at being tossed into the opening riff from Springsteen’s ‘The Promised Land’ (albeit acoustically strummed) seasoned with the old-as-time double-layered boy/girl country vocal lines.

The legendary Paul Westerberg gets the treatment twice in a row: on ‘Dog Eaten – a ‘Skyway’ guitar hum drifting into some great, stoic lyrics about mistrust and the acceptance of sadness, Schuster describing his own innocence “In the smallest hours of the morning / When I was busy dreaming / Of tender hearted girls”; then on ‘Rest’, a less accomplished stab at the Minneapolis master’s canon that reveals itself as more of an Avett Brothers kind of homily song – just not quite as down-home, nor as good.

Elsewhere there are Felice Brothers vibes on rocker ‘Short Hair’, plenty of vocal lines reminiscent of Dolorean’s Al James all over the place, a dash of labelmates Great Lake Swimmers on the druggedly slow bar-room lament ‘Low & Long’, even a spiced snort of Wilco on the 22 seconds of ‘CHW’; but as thrown-back as the two-piece can be, there’s not really much stock to be put in doubting their good intentions.

Even when riffs are lifted wholesale (again) as on the ‘Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere’-apeing ‘Whoa Back’ it feels not so much of a rip-off as a genuine tribute: the sound of two guys writing songs about their own lives, perhaps stumbling across familiar, welcoming sounds and incorporating them into their work. It’s not like they are trying to reinvent rootsy, small town alt. here, they’re simply cracking out some good, memorable songs, doffing their caps to the masters as they ride by.

There are, as one hopes for throughout, a couple of very good songs at the tail-end of the record, almost as if they’d had their fun with the homages and little backward glances and settled into a new sense of seriousness in the closing minutes. Both ‘Fresh Hell/Is It Well’ , the most genuine sounding track on the whole album with its tragic, confessional lyric “Everyone I miss is gone and everyone I love is leaving too” set into a brilliantly logical, satisfying howl of melody, and closer ‘On the Day’, with its maudlin, morbid deathbed imagery (“The lies I’ve told will come creeping through my bedroom window” he mutters) are songs worthy of the band’s aforementioned influences.

So who knows what’s to come from a project like this? Whether there’s room for another canoe-carrying trucker-cap band in the world isn’t in question – there somehow always is. But is there a need for any more referential, reverential backward looking from our bands? Well, they sound good, that’s the thing – for all their callbacks and revivalist mannerisms, these songs are enjoyable; and it may just be the comfort of the familiar or even the sense memories evoked by the nearness of their music to that of others, but whatever it is, it’s hard to overly criticise a record that – despite its flaws and the problems with its presentation – proves to be an endearing and relatively winning one.