Forsooth, Gadzooks and a side order of medieval 'Yikes!' to go, please waiter, for The Frank & Walters are back and making a smock-addled mockery of this beast we call fashion. To wit, six years ago three charming young blokes wander over to London from Cork, blabber on about The Beatles, The Beatles and yet more Beatles, bang out a string of indecently poppy records and then - kaboing! - they vanish as sleekly as they arrived. And the funny thing is? That were this the Frankies' debut we would be reaching for the Britpop Bible Of Oblivion and proclaiming them as the new Kula-Shaker-without-all-the-Eastern-mysticism-or-effects it's OK to whistle along to. But it isn't their debut, it's their follow-up to 'Trains, Boats And Planes' so we won't. Not yet, anyway.

If they sounded gleefully old-fashioned back then, it's grand news for gramophones everywhere that the trio have stuck so resolutely to their zimmerframed grins, for 'The Grand Parade' is an album that states the bleedin' obvious in an extremely bleedin' obvious way. The Frank & Walters might be slightly more muscular and marginally less barmy than before, but that doesn't mean they're about to relinquish their grip on the simplest of choruses, the sneakiest of guitar solos or the jauntiest of melodic joys (see the puppy Pulpisms of 'Saturday Night').

As ever, they're at their resounding best when chundering through thunderous mini-epics - cue 'Little Dolls', 'Landslide' and the quite literally huge-mungous 'How Can I Exist?' - which swoop around with all the quintessential innocence and sense of wide-eyed wonderment that made the Frankies so stupidly endearing in the first place. Older, but still fizzing like Tizer.