Pitchfork

+/- have always come off as guilty pleasure emo fans, indulging at painstaking length in histrionic vocals and fey guitar lines before giving more stoic indie listeners some sort of reassuring sign, whether via a hiccuping lap-pop glitch or an unfeeling angular riff out of leftfield. At the core of every +/- track there's a dewy-eyed adolescent bitching about some girl in his diary; we just didn't notice it on the group's previous two releases because of all the electro dressings and stylistic wanderlust. On this early version of Let's Build a Fire (the Absolutely Kosher version is reviewed here), +/- take way more cues from the heart than brain, sacrificing technical exploration for good ol' fashioned, bare-boned emoting. So yeah, consider them all but out of the emo closet.

Before sewing the scarlet "E" on their chest though, it's worth noting the more linear advances they're made since 2003's You Are Here. The opening title track takes genre-hopping to the next level, masking a straightforward dream popper with Irving Berlin orchestration, everything cracking and hissing as if out of a 1930s vacuum tube radio. Propelling the band back to the future, "Back and Forth" feels devoid of human contact, let alone sentimentality. James Baluyut's unintelligible lyrics blast over an oscillating, out of tune guitar, the two in tandem fending off a maelstrom chorus of (gasp!) cymbal crashes and power chords.

However, stripped of their bells and whistles, +/- stands stark naked for long stretches at a time on Fire, relying on rudimentary chord changes and wistful vocals reminiscent of Death Cab at their most rote. "The Important Thing Is Love", "Summer Dress 2 (Iodine)", and "Ignoring All Detours" comprise a maudlin three-headed monster, providing the album a warm, gooey middle low on nutrients. "Detours" particularly drags as Baluyut constructs a melody so vapid his croon sounds more like a digitally-enhanced sine wave.

If they haven't already, +/- now stink a tad like Versus backwash. There are some real bright spots here that would measure well against the Wrens twitchy brand of pop-punk, "Fadeout" and "Steal the Blueprints" in particular, but these guys seem indifferent to self-editing, thus creating the massive disparity between those standouts and clunkers like "Camouflage Fades Into Trust", a song that sounds just as schmaltzy and half-baked as its title suggests. At the end of the day, the dearth of ideas hamstrings Fire, not the finely-tuned heartstrings. After all, there's nothing wrong with wearing your heart on your sleeve, but it becomes problematic when that gushing heart's also used to patch up some otherwise shoddy stitching.