According to Dave McCabe, the singer and songwriter with the Zutons, coming up with a good songs is a game of chance. “It's like bingo, music,” says the man who hit the jackpot by writing Valerie, the track given an injection of global hit hormones by Mark Ronson and Amy Winehouse. “You grab a ball and hope it's a good one.”

Their third album, recorded in Los Angeles with the Black Crowes/Primal Scream producer George Drakoulias, looks set to continue the Zutons' winning streak. It's more quirky retro rock for young men who yearn to grow more facial hair and have a girlfriend such as the saxophonist Abi Harding, a formula that has not done them any harm at all so far.

However, some of the doubts that have dogged them since their debut Who Killed... The Zutons? remain - the Gene Hunt pub-rock, and the traces of quirkiness that make it hard to get too emotionally involved with them. Even when they are attempting to be serious, they sound as if they could descend into braces-twanging comedy music at any moment. Dirty Rat and Bumbag might skirt difficult issues - bad relationships, social exclusion - but there is a ramshackle jauntiness to the music that undermines the impact. It's like admiring a flower in somebody's lapel only to be squirted with water, a musical hand-buzzer concealed in the sweaty palm of each song. You Could Make the Four Walls Cry, bolstered stridently by vocals from Harding, sounds unhappily like Space, while Freak, about working as a gigolo, is a noble attempt to earn the tag “gritty vignette” yet ultimately lacks the tang of real experience.

There are moments that convey the thrill of getting it right: Always Right Behind You is Tiger Feet in trainers, a brassy glam racket redolent of Brut and Skol; What's Your Problem is a text message version of Dexy's; and Put a Little Aside's infidelity blues comes closest to Valerie's soulful appeal. Yet You Can Do Anything still sounds like a band struggling to come of age, desperate to look grown-up yet not quite able to grow convincing rock'n'roll sideburns. After the hitmaker's full house of Valerie, this album is half-way there.

(Deltasonic, TMS £11.99, call 0845 6026328)

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