You have to feel for Adam Cohen. Now 41, he’s striving to carve out a career as a songwriter while his father – that would be laughing Lenny – is heralded as one of the all-time greats. The ‘struggling sons of the fathers’ club is a sizeable one – for every Rufus Wainwright, you have a Jakob Dylan or James McCartney failing to live up to big expectations when they step up to the mic. Maybe Duncan Jones got it right when he ducked the Bowie Senior comparisons and opted for a career in film.
Rather than running away from his heritage, Cohen’s fourth album embraces it. We Go Home was recorded in his various childhood abodes and we get lyrical winks to his father’s work throughout. It is unfair, of course, to compare Adam to Leonard, not least because – apart from his low spoken growl on ‘Too Real’ – their voices and styles are oceans apart. The problem is, even taken purely on its own merits, We Go Home doesn’t hit the high spots either.
Mixing Americana and folk-pop with some Brill Building allusions, the sound is rustic, with a warm, oaky finish. Cohen can hold a tune and the instrumentation is tasteful, but it’s all rather polite. Indeed, there’s the occasional downright clunker lyrically. The record begins with Cohen pulling the old ‘a song about a song’ trick and is at its weakest on ‘Love Is’. In the end, the persistent Leonard references do him no favours at all.
Ironically, when he deals directly with their relationship, on ‘Fall Apart’, he strikes gold. A strong melody coalesces with a broken-hearted vocal and a genuinely interesting, well-executed lyrical idea: this is a properly moving song. Its power is a hint of what might have been.

OUT SEPTEMBER 12