Pitchfork

Congratulations, you wish you were dead. While you're imagining what would happen if that bus-- not, alas, a double-decker-- were to ignore the red light and spare you another unbearable moment of existence, I'm busy wondering why I should care. When the rock scribes of yore slagged Morrissey for his unrelenting moroseness, they were missing not only irony, but also the greater emotional truths behind even the Smiths' most melodramatic plaints. Acting miserable is easy-- psst, eyedrops-- but effectively weaving sadness into song, whether earnestly like Elliott Smith or ambiguously like Moz, is really, really hard.

New York indie rockers The Isles may or may not want to go the way of The Queen Is Dead's macabre romantics. Their songs, though, have one foot in the grave, one foot in the English gloom of the Smiths and Echo & the Bunnymen, and another in the brittle downtown dolefulness of Interpol-- which I guess makes them some sort of weird tripod. Gruesome mutations aside, the Isles sound more like bored teenagers, or, fatally, like they want to sound like bored teenagers: "I'd be dead, but there's nothing worth dying for/ In my skin, there are times that I don't belong." Dude, that's not your skin, those are your jeans, and when I get that feeling it means I ate too many chalupas.

Are things really so dire? The Isles' alternately jangling and jagged mope-rock is polished, if unremarkable; singer Andrew Gellers borrows both Moz's strangled enunciations ("loathing lovers") and Paul Banks' clipped monotone, though his high, clear whisper is actually more like Ben Gibbard's. But Gellers' reactions to daily life suggest not so much existential malaise as poorly remembered stereotypes of adolescence, nearly as over-the-top as My Chemical Romance but even less believable. "There are some things that I would rather do/ Than spend my time doing what people do," Gellers offers.

Whatever the Isles would rather do, it's probably deathly serious. Polluted air? "I won't breathe anymore," Gellers resolves over rubbery bass lines on "Summer Loan". Out-of-body experience? "I wasn't flying high in the sky/ I went down to hell," he moans on finale "Post Nobles". Then, there's the misguided sex jam, woefully titled "Eve of the Battle": "I've got some things on my mind I wanna do to you/ Are you coming?"

Without the arch playfulness of Moz or the weary pathos of, say, Johnny Cash, the Isles provide little to make their misery compelling to the outside world. It probably isn't their fault; as Gellers sagely proffers on opener "Major Arcana", the most Smiths-like track, "The breeze cannot decide to be fresh/ To be cold." Cold like the grave, man.