Black Cab like a good concept. Their debut album, Altamont Diary, was based around a famous riot at a Rolling Stones free gig in Altamont in 1969. Critical acclaim rightly followed for the duo's skilful revival of the 60s for those of us born too late. The follow-up, Jesus East, takes a more nebulous concept from around the same time, but doesn't quite hit the same musical peaks.

The basic allegory, apparently, is of a journey by George Harrison to India, then back to Berlin to rock out - fictitious, but as Harrison was the first Western musician to wield a sitar in anger, on Norwegian Wood, well plausible. It's the point where psychedelia and Indian music and krautrock collide - think Tomorrow Never Knows meets Faust.

And this is exactly what we get from the start. The opener, Hearts on Fire has a pulsating bass-line and driving drums which could have been stripped from a Neu! record - though everything's thankfully well recorded and produced. There are extended guitar solos, not many more than two chords, and the vocals when you hear them are all reverby and phased and undeniably psychedelic. Without blowing me away, it holds attention well and promises much for the rest of the album.

The next three tracks are variants on this modus operandi, with rhythms krautrock-propulsive and all psychedelic boxes ticked: repetitive lyrics that don't mean much, plenty of distortion, electronic effects. It adds up to a busy sound with the echoing, almost tuneless vocals often disappearing in the controlled chaos - as one would expect, mind, from both the quoted genres. Underground Star is a bit more poppy - it's upbeat, with handclaps! - and Another Sun is where we first get some Indian influence, though really just bookending the body of the track. It's all executed well but the album has yet to grab me.

And, by-and-large, it doesn't. 13 Days stands out as a nice sitar-and-tabla ramble which eventually dissolves into swirling, cascading drums - it reminds of Good Drugs on the previous album, though less rock. There are a couple more krautrocky numbers and a little instrumental number called Randy Sez, which neatly skewers the concept of the album in the same way Jerry Sez did on Altamont Diary.

And then there are the last two tracks; where the album actually loses me. Valiant is a seven minute spoken-word piece, effectively; a jangly, unobtrusive backing behind Sam Cutler (former manager of The Stones and The Grateful Dead) talking about his time with the Dead, eulogising the whole period. This is a nice callback to the previous album (Cutler was at Altamont) and as a sketch of the anti-authoritarian, druggy counter-culture of the time is fine. But he's constantly comparing, with a curmudgeonly things-were-better-in-the-old-days vibe - these days, apparently, "everyone's doing different drugs" at shows while in the old days "they went to share something" - "it was a sacramental experience". It's a bit embarrassing, really. And this is compounded on the last track, The Path, as Cutler tells us: open your eyes, most things don't actually matter". Admirable sentiments which may even be true, but when looped with sitar for two and a half minutes become little more than a say-no-to-drugs ad.

But that was, I suppose, the seventies. Black Cab again hit their target on this album, but it's less effective musically than their last, partly because the genres, while revolutionary at the time, weren't actually so musically interesting - it was more about the cultures and movements surrounding them. It's well performed, well produced and quite enjoyable in bits, but they just can't wring enough interest from this subject matter.