Codeine Velvet Club is a side-project of Fratellis lead singer Jon Fratelli (real name John Lawler). He has teamed up with accomplished chanteuse Lou Hickey to create this quirkily retro album of the same name while on a break from his main job.

The album itself is what you might call ‘currently under release’ – the subject of a marketing experiment that will see it gradually revealed to the world via we7 and then Spotify a couple of tracks at a time between now and Christmas. The man from Island says he is confident that this will create “a huge word-of-mouth viral uptake”, which sounds rather unpleasant.

Back to the album, though, which doesn’t sound unpleasant at all. This collection of catchy little numbers inspired by the 60s beautifully combines Lawler’s straightforward indie delivery with Hickey’s vampishly sweet cabaret tones, which both in turn benefit from a richly orchestral accompaniment that’s never heard the phrase, “less is more”. The combination works especially well on Vanity Kills, the deliciously cool lead single and the song that reportedly started the collaboration. It also sounds good on Hollywood, the next single and a song for swinging Fratellis lovers everywhere.

The album is at its most appealing, though, when the sixties pastiche thing takes a back seat and a wider variety of ideas is on show – the quirkily different melody and unsettling time changes in the aptly-named Time is a good example. Other highlight tracks are the Fratellis-style rock-along I Would Send You Roses and the waltzing closer Begging Bowl Blues, with its piquant combination of guitar and strings. All of the above do to some extent bring a new take to long-established ideas but, looking across the whole album, such novelty is spread rather too thinly.

So far, we’ve avoided mentioning the Last Shadow Puppets, but the parallels between the album under discussion and the 2008 side project involving the Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner are too glaringly obvious to ignore altogether. Both works look back musically to the sixties, both are orchestrally rich to the point of excess, and both are the result of collaborations involving frontmen of super-successful indie bands. So how does this new album stack up against The Age Of The Understatement?

Unfortunately, not that well. Though superficially similar in flavour, the Codeine Velvet Club album lacks either the quirky surrealism or the genuine power to move and delight that characterised the Alex Turner/Miles Kane collaboration.

That, in a nutshell, is the main limitation of the album before us. It’s lovely to listen to, it does the sounds of the sixties awfully well, it will probably sound great in a movie soundtrack or two, and it has lots of fun with a whole young person’s guide to the orchestra. But, ultimately, it doesn’t have enough new ideas to be either memorable or important – and no amount of innovative marketing is going to change that.