The Comfies settle for a worn-in sound

Following in the mainstream ruts dug by large record labels and preprogrammed radio stations, The Comfies' debut album "Close to Me" sacrifices their inherent songwriting knack for a more marketable sound.

The EP does show potential though. Each of the songs has a slightly different feel and the musicians seem to know their way around a cornucopia of instruments.

This expertise is evident in songs like "Medicine," with its brief riff war between two punctual and panned guitars. Or the harpsichord bridge about halfway through "In My Room," which eases the listless audience into yet another chorus.

Front man and songwriter Benjamin Adam Harper has a talent for writing rock to a pop formula and some of the songs are quite catchy. Disliking the band alone will not prevent the listener from ending up humming the chorus to "That's What She Gets" two days later.

Though, as the album's energy dwindles, the tracks begin to grow detrimentally repetitive. A listener can just as soon absorb the first thirty seconds of any given song on the album and extrapolate the rest.

The lyrics are painfully dull and better left unspoken. Harper seems to have put them together almost as an afterthought and with a thumb in his rhyming dictionary.

"Through your barricade / We're runnin' away / And now you got nothin' to say / I'm high!"

Despite a presumably long list of influences, The Comfies seem like a three-years-too-late answer to the krautrock/new wave rebirth. What the band lacks in this respect is the cool swagger. They sound like a non-nonchalant Interpol or a Franz Ferdinand.

However, it would be an understatement to confine "Close to Me" to this criticism. "Understanding 23" runs on the indie piano rock feel captured first by Ben Folds. And the short acoustic guitar driven track, "Dear Miss Anderson," has a spaced-out sus-chord texture that could make Coldplay proud.

The Comfies appear as if they know what they're doing, but somehow fall short of delivering anything creative or thoroughly entertaining. The final product is the type of generic rock heard on Madden before the players wisely upload their own play list.