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If you were trying to describe what Southern rock is to the innocent inhabitants of Planet Throg, you couldn’t do better than pop a copy of this CD into the space capsule, along with a link to their Facebook page.

Everything about Arkansas five-piece Zach Williams & The Reformation epitomises the genre: the hats, the hair, the attitude and of course the music.

Their second album, A Southern Offering, is exactly what it says – a well-produced, played and sung inventory of riffs and hooks that wallow in the essence, from Lynyrd Skynyrd to Molly Hatchett and back.

It’s all done without a trace of irony, which is another trait of Southern rock. It’s like the Drive By Truckers never existed.

Hugh Fielder has been writing about music for 47 years. Actually 58 if you include the essay he wrote about the Rolling Stones in exchange for taking time off school to see them at the Ipswich Gaumont in 1964. He was news editor of Sounds magazine from 1975 to 1992 and editor of Tower Records Top magazine from 1992 to 2001. Since then he has been freelance. He has interviewed the great, the good and the not so good and written books about some of them. His favourite possession is a piece of columnar basalt he brought back from Iceland.