You could, if you were so minded, infer a lot from the title of Spector's debut album. The east London quintet began the year on the BBC Sound of 2012 list, recipients of an apparently huge major label deal. They represented a concerted push for commercial success from frontman Fred MacPherson, whose previous musical endeavours were perhaps fated to remain a minority interest: Les Incompetents' attempt to meld spindly, Libertines indie with public school-accented hilarity; Ox.Eagle.Lion.Man. – a goth prog band who, alas, referred to one of their EPs as "a 26-minute opus in five parts".

With a male model on bass, and McPherson talking a good fight in interviews (his ideal fan would be "someone who has a lot of money to spend on merchandise and multiple copies of our records"), Spector were clearly intended for bigger things: not for them earning an honest crust supporting Johnny Foreigner and Dananananaykroyd at the Tunbridge Wells Forum. Musically, wild comparisons have been made to Roxy Music, to whom, on the evidence of Enjoy It While It Lasts, Spector bear no more similarity than they do the Bamileke drummers of Cameroon. McPherson is closer to the truth when he claims their sound harks back to 2003. The thought of holding up the year of Dido's Life for Rent and the Stereophonics' You Gotta Go There to Come Back as a golden era ripe for revival might make your head hurt a bit, but in fairness, it was a year when a band like Spector might be expected to do good business.

Indeed, a band like Spector did do good business in 2003: the Killers, with whom they share a love of pumped-up synthesisers, an audibly burning desperation to have their songs bellowed along to by vast crowds – the massed backing vocals on Friday Night, Don't Let It End and Upset Boulevard an unsubtle signpost to their intentions – and a boldness with anthemic melodies that fainter hearts might shy away from as too obvious. That latter point might sound like a criticism, but it isn't. If you're out to win over stadiums, there's not a lot of point worrying about subtlety, and there's something appealing about the way the tune of Chevy Thunder drags you along with it even as you note how entirely ridiculous it is, particularly if you imagine the Chevrolet McPherson claims he's going to steal and "drive drive drive" until he kills himself isn't an iconic American model, but one of the more readily available British counterparts, and that he's loudly going to his doom in an economical five-door Aveo – "fun to drive, yet light on fuel".

But you can't make it 2003 again, however hard you wish, which perhaps explains the weird tinge of disappointment that seems to infect the album. For all the upbeat melodicism, McPherson often sounds like a man worried his time might have passed even as it appeared to come. "Are these really the days and nights we used to read about, we used to dream about?" asks True Love (For Now). "Give it all up, the sun has set," advises 20Nothing. Perhaps he's right. Eight months on from The Sound of 2012 poll, in a world in which instant results are expected, none of Spector's singles have made the charts. The album's title, which must once have seemed as knowing and arch as the slogan on their website – Nothing You Haven't Heard Before – or the interlude that features a booming voiceover warning "this is a musical emergency, piracy is a crime", now has a touch of memo-to-self about it.

In fact, commercial failure seems a rather cruel fate. At their worst, when they confront you with makeweight chugging alt-rock so glossy and sterile it doesn't seem to have been produced so much as laminated, you're struck by the terrifying sensation that Spector might be Menswear to the Vaccines' Blur. But there's more to admire here than just chutzpah. McPherson is a far better lyricist than you might expect given the style-over-substance hype and the fact that he appears to have concluded it's a good idea to call a song Grim Reefer. He's got a striking turn of phrase – "I tasted a hundred friends of mine on your lips" – which, like his crooning voice, is best supported when Spector turn to ballads. Based on clanking electronic rhythms, Grey Shirt and Tie and Lay Low are genuinely affecting, because they're really good songs. Good enough, in fact, to convince you there's real substance beneath the posturing, something that might develop and blossom given time. As the title suggests they know only too well, time isn't on Spector's side. Even so, there's enough here to make you hope they're proved wrong.