Pitchfork

The songs on 31Knots' fifth full-length are superficially interesting because of their instrumental or lyrical barrages and clever production; frontman Joe Haege writes about the daily rat race or dogmatic defeat and sounds like Zach de la Rocha rooming with Cedric Bixler in college. But it gets boring fast: The 11 songs on The Days and Nights come in different outfits, all covering the same thin, half-baked, post-grad body concerned with how done society is or how over people Haege is. The musical inspiration is clear. Note the Shipping News hyper-rhythm of "The Salted Tongue" and the cabaret punk of "Savage Boutique", or the June of 44 vibraphones of "Everything in Letters" and the piano pleading of "Pulse of a Decimal". Still, hear 'em all several times and all that sticks are meaningless twists of phrase, vocal over-exacerbation, and instrumental dexterity that doesn't know tantalization from taste.

If The Days and Nights has one underlying fault, it's that nothing about it feels personal or developed enough. Haege and his trio understand song structure and movement, but everything about the 11 tracks here feels either clever or finished by half. Lyrically, Haege trades the specificities of his experiences for the vagaries of his condescending commentary, telling us what he thinks about everything instead of showing us he has a reason to know anything. He writes songs without handlebars. He frames those laments in first person, but it sounds more like he's preaching than pleading. Haege's voice is always at a full melodramatic tilt, too, the sound of a man safe in a studio as he tells us how we should be. Do lines like "Walk between the raindrops for a dollar a day/ It's tragic you're so tardy or just fashionably late/ A savage in surrender with vicious intent" actually compel anyone, even when shouted?

Still, even for a band that's chomping at the social bit, they've made a record that's remarkably normal. Though they sample Archie Shepp and Beethoven on one track (without much purpose), they also hack standard scales for long-winded instrumental excursions (see "The Salted Tongue", which also includes a drum solo) and conclude the record with an "epic" track that's subdivided between equal noise and big, distended harmonies ready-made for an outro. The Days and Nights is a least-common denominator indie rock album, borrowing cues from the last two decades of things you've probably loved. If Haege would just fess up and stop telling us he's "assassin of the reason you want to exist," it would be a bit more bearable. It would also help if the band would stop depending on production for making songs sound different.