Mute Math — Armistice

Armistice

Teleprompt/Warner

Caitlin Hotchkiss (CHARTattack)

09/23/2009 3:12pm

Mute Math have arrived at just the right time.

When the darlings of the hipsters and the blogosphere are all fashionable skinny-boy bands who play frantic dance rock, MM fit right in. They've got the synth effects, the disco hi-hat drums, the impassioned male vocals and the anthemic songs. How could this not equal success?

Well, by all accounts, it has — Mute Math have had some good tours in their six-year existence, and they've put out a number of albums that have gotten them compared to New Order (very apt) and Radiohead (huh?).

Yet there's something just undeniably vanilla about them, or maybe it seems that way because we've seen all this in promising young bands before.

The themes and lyrics to their songs are pretty hackneyed and definitely overused — love, loss, war, us-against-the-world, et cetera — but they at least bulk up these songs with some nice instrumentation (strings, piano, even trumpet) and melody lines to give them some punch. This is in comparison to the title track, which sounds like cheesy '80s music (and not even the good nostalgic kind), or "Pins And Needles," which is drowsy and unremarkable.

I really wanted to like Armistice — and I thought I did after the first spin — but on consequent listens it just all melded together, and I stopped paying attention. There's some nice little stand-outs, like the punchy "Backfire," but on a whole, it's an easy album to sleep on.

There's very little daring or new about them, but if you're already into the indie hipster dance-rock movement, you'll probably dig this. Otherwise, give it a pass and buy a New Order album instead.

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