Until the World Is Happy; Wake Up You Sleepyhead Sun

Apparently, one solution when a band can't decide on a title for their debut album is to simply graft two of the leading contenders together with a semicolon. Similarly, when a band can't decide if they want to ape the neo-prog of the Mars Volta or the angsty but straightforward pop-punk of Green Day's American Idiot, one solution is to try to tackle both at once. Or at least, those seem to be the options that Mesa, AZ's Small Leaks Sink Ships went with. Giving their debut album two separate, unrelated titles for no apparent reason (the ten songs don't appear to form a pair of interconnected suites or anything like that), the quartet dress up fairly standard issue pop-punk tunes with math rock noodling, showy time-signature changes, and dynamic shifts into unnecessarily complicated B sections that do little more than negate the energetic heads of steam that they had worked up beforehand. As a result, this rather frustrating album has its high points (the fractured stop-time verses of "Sackcloth in Ashes" are admittedly pretty cool, though the lyrics suggest they don't quite have their Biblical idioms entirely down), but the overall feel is that of a modern indie rock version of Abacab-era Genesis: fairly appealing pop songs dressed up with prog rock fripperies that end up making it all sound kind of pretentious.