Pitchfork

Unless you dye them or genetically modify them, roses aren't ever supposed to be blue. That fact has made the blue rose a plant rich in metaphor, from the Victorian language of flowers to Tennessee Williams play The Glass Menagerie. In the latter, one character tells another she has the illness pleurosis, and he thinks she says "blue roses." Vancouver-based Hello, Blue Roses are the romantically entangled duo of Dan Bejar (Destroyer, New Pornographers, Swan Lake) and visual artist Sydney Vermont, and the title of their debut full-length, The Portrait Is Finished and I Have Failed to Capture Your Beauty..., may suggest an attempt to achieve something as impossible as blue roses-- express the inexpressible.

These flowers are of a more common variety. Bejar's blogger-friendly presence may be Hello, Blue Roses' sharpest hook, but the album is mainly a vehicle for Vermont's lilting folk lullabies-- she writes every song except the finale, a boy-girl cover of UK psych-folkie Kevin Ayers' "Hymn"-- and most are relatively indistinguishable. The couple of times the tracks cohere into something more solid than sleepy acoustic-guitar strums, drippy vintage synths, and Vermont's frilly, ambling soprano vocal lines, they do hit upon something fairly pleasant. Too often, though, they don't really work, nor do they give much reason for repeat spins. Hello, Blue Roses? Behold, the lilies of the field.

When the duo's "Shadow Falls" hit the internet last fall, it sounded like a reasonably auspicious beginning. Turns out it's atypical in both style and quality, its tuneful romanticism a rare moment of warmth and clarity on a record that otherwise easily fades into the background. Bejar and Vermont's voices ably complement each other, blanketed by Prefab Sprout-minded synths, restrained electric guitar, and a pulsing kick drum on an album otherwise pretty short on beats. There's a throwaway rhyme about "the mange", but at least you can hum along. Well-placed wordless vocals by Bejar make the shambling, almost Softies-like "Scarecrow" one more standout. Another exception to the album's overall drabness is "St. Angela", the only track featuring a full band. A rollicking "Maggie May" guitar solo, organ, and, yes, drums, all help to support Vermont's staid, Christine McVie-like lead vocal.

Fuzztone guitar and the occasional woodwinds dress up the many slow-paced songs, but repetitive, fragmentary compositions such as "Paquita Reads by Candlelight", Vancouver-repping "Skeleton Aim", and the typically moribund "Come Darkness" sound more concerned with melisma than memorable melodies or vibrant production. The piano-based "Sunny Star" has plinking, rudimentary piano reminiscent of underrated Cat Power and Yoko Ono collaboration "Revelations", but in contrast to that song's poignant directness, we get more vocal flights and vague imagery. On "Coming Through Imposture", Bejar repeats the phrase "coming through imposture," a chorus not so much "cryptic"-- Bejar's own songwriting rep-- as turgid.

Not long into opening track "Hello Blue Roses" (no comma), Vermont sings, "The time has come." That's also the title of a beautiful, long-overlooked 1971 album by English folkie Anne Briggs. While Vermont is a fine singer, she doesn't have Briggs' effortlessness, and there's a shaky, naturalistic imperfection to her vocals on songs like "Golden Fruit"-- in which she blandly asks, "When will the world change?"-- that would be better suited to a less flowery vocalist.

All happy couples aren't alike, but they each live in their own world, full of shared confidences, intimate moments, and stupid inside jokes. If we're to take The Portrait Is Finished and I Have Failed to Capture Your Beauty... as a document of Bejar and Vermont's love, the album's shortcoming might not be so much that Hello, Blue Roses have failed to capture their love's beauty-- nor that expressing love is, like blue roses, fundamentally impossible. Instead, the problem might be that as much as everybody likes to gossip about unhappy couples, happy couples are only interesting to themselves.