You’d be forgiven for thinking the album ‘C48’ was named after a seat in Croke Park or a part of a license plate on a car. What it supposedly denotes is the length of the album and the age of its creator, but it feels unnecessarily cryptic, not really conjuring images of a folk album as it should. To say it was the only questionable decision on Sean Millar’s sixth album would be untrue, but unlike the title, most of the rest of what goes wrong here cannot be so easily explained away.

The opening track Wake Up Outside London is promising. We’re dealing with a character on a hangover following in the vein of Kris Kristofferson’s Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down, and it does a good job of evoking images of loneliness and a life poorly lived. It also showcases what could be described as Millar’s “real” voice, a thing he doesn’t always make use of; in the following track My Kids he struggles to navigate the rapidly descending notes of a sean nós style of singing that doesn’t work, and actually sounds a bit like he’s crouching over a laptop singing into its built-in microphone.

I’ve Never Loved Somebody makes use of a John Lennon-style voice, and what better to sing about love? It’s a much higher register than that which he uses on the rest of the album but it works quite well, the only issue being that there isn’t enough belief behind it. The melody is very good and satisfying but the music and the vocals don’t feel transcendent in any way – you can’t keep the force of the line “no one I think is in my tree” as it’s sang on that famous Beatles recording out of your head when you hear this song, which is to its detriment.

Dancing With Dogs is probably the best song but it’s very predictable and unchallenging, which may give an indication of the kind of album this is. What is challenging is trying to figure out the lyrics at times. From Your Eyes Like Sorrow comes the line “Before I knew you, baby/I did not believe/That love could live/Without a price on its head” which if you knock out the padding becomes the slightly more palatable but still fairly vague “before I knew you I believed that love lived with a price on its head”. This is not an isolated incident either, it happens frequently enough to make it endemic (Let My Criminal Speak’s “And in the Bible it says…” is a bit of lyrical suicide).

It keeps this kind of slight country tone for its duration, never getting near the high-points that sound is capable of reaching until the final hidden track, which has a chorus repeating the words “sick with desire”. Oblivious to the rest of the album, it sounds like a weird ’80s synth-based pop song, so much so that you can almost picture the black clothes and the weird hairdos on the guys bopping at keyboards at a performance on Top of the Tops while the studio lights flash and the camera swoops around them. This is Sean Millar’s ‘C48’, an album that you’re still not sure what it’s all about, even after hearing it.