am Duckworth’s debut album literally wears its teenage self-importance on its sleeve—its booklet is designed to look like a journal, complete with sellotaped train tickets and hand-scribbled lyrics. Coupled with his chosen name, chosen album title, and a song called “If I Had £1 For Every Stale Song Title I’d Be Thirty Short of Getting Out of This Mess,” you’d be forgiven for expecting The Chronicles of a Bohemian Teenager to be well into emo territory.

But while Chronicles often does recall that most self-indulgent of genres in its more introspective lyrics, the album is a very different beast. Musically, diminutive songs are built around picked acoustic guitar and crisp laptop beats, which are combined in an impressively seamless way. Deft touches of cello, violin, and cornet help to prevent the pallete from ever seeming too limited, and Duckworth’s delivery is far from pretty, but also free of whine. Hell, all the rough edges and dropped consonants make it almost seem like Duckworth is aping the conversational style of fellow Essex boy Billy Bragg.

The biggest similarity to emo comes in the number of songs about songs, or songs about writing songs about… well, you get the idea. There’s a refreshing idealism, at least as far as the power of music goes, though. Coupled with an analytical eye and sharp way with a phrase, it keeps these songs compelling even when they’re at their most inward-looking and conceptual. “Once More With Feeling” reassures and encourages—“it’s not naïve to think that you can change things around” and opens the record with a gentle glow. “I-Spy” neatly espouses the power of sing-alongs in self-referential fashion, and while “An Oak Tree” might insist that “there’s still something of worth in just an acoustic and a voice” it’s backed by a busy shuffle that helps it sound a call for clarity rather than dreary traditionalism.

Best of all is “Call Me Ishmael,” a paean to transcendent moments in music—and life—that comes close to creating its own as the final “these are the moments that we’re living for” chorus kicks in and it opens up to the most triumphant of cornet blasts. “The Lighthouse Keeper” shows that there’s potential for a future in more than navel gazing too. The most delicate acoustic song on the record, it touchingly captures the conflict between the reassurance of home and a Southend where “the neon lights and screeching tyres swarm like moths to pier fires” as another arsonist strikes.

When Duckworth actually follows up on his hopes to change the world and uses his album as a soapbox, though, the same lack of guile that appeals elsewhere falters. It doesn’t help that the three most politically charged songs on the album follow one right after another (in the center of the album, no less). He just about carries off “Glass Houses,” a heartfelt decrying of anti-immigrant bigotry, but when he widens the scope of his targets and moves further from his own experience it gets ugly. “Whitewash Is Brainwash” ruins probably the best beat of the album by falling into unoriginal hectoring and it’s doubtful if we ever need another person to tell us that Big Brother and Ikea are ruining our society. “Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly” is even worse, with hopelessly muddled storytelling, mawkish references to crying Africans and pleas to “open your eyes, you don’t need to buy” that would be trite and useless even if they didn’t come from someone with Warner Bros.’ commercial clout behind him.