Prosaics: Aghast Agape EP

For the first 12 seconds of their debut EP, it sounds like Prosaics might be on to something. “Teeth” announces the band’s arrival with throttling, distorted bass, heavily-building drums and sharp blasts of guitar. As far as intros go, this one is hard to beat. It snaps you to attention and is open-ended enough so that you don’t know exactly where the band will take it. Unfortunately, this proves to be the most – and arguably the only – enjoyable portion of Aghast Agape. The intrigue created in those first dozen seconds dissipates just as quickly, and from there on out the band heads down that very well-traveled road of carefully crafted, overdramatic post-punk.

It’s not necessarily a bad career decision for the New York based trio. Plenty of similarly inclined acts from Interpol to The Rapture, The Killers to Franz Ferdinand have found plenty of success with their angular, rhythmic songs. The band has already impressed some of the right people, as Matador (home of Interpol) is handling the U.K. release of the EP. Combine this with the fact that Prosaics, too, have a predilection for sharp, black suits and neatly-coiffed hair, and the Interpol comparisons are already coming fast and furious.

The comparisons are justified, and they don’t do Prosaics any favors. Fans of Interpol will see Prosaics as a watered-down version of the original, unable to create the same type of dynamic soundscapes, while also falling short when it comes to memorable melodies. Say what you will about Paul Banks ripping off Ian Curtis with his dramatic monotone, but it fits his band’s songs perfectly. Meanwhile, Prosaics’ singer Andy Cromer doesn’t do anything but make you feel like maybe the poetry you wrote senior year of high school wasn’t so bad after all. If you ever wondered what the perfect midpoint of pretension and utter ridiculousness was, look no farther than Cromer’s lyrics.

He starts the record off with a couplet of “Apocryphal lament/familiarity contempt,” which is enough to stop you in your tracks, but he tops himself at the beginning of “Not the Shadow of the Column” when he moans “The brush descends the length of intervals book-ended with eyes ajar in name, but name falls pitifully on its pride.” And moaning is exactly how he delivers his lines. Almost every syllable is painstakingly drawn out, with Cromer attempting to resonate in the manner of Morrissey or Robert Smith, but instead coming off like a lesser version of Jimmy Eat World’s Jim Adkins.

For those who don’t see what the big deal is with Interpol, they will be even harder pressed to find a reason to care about Prosaics. If there was a “Post-punk for Dummies” musical guide, Prosaics would likely be the soundtrack. You can sense when the tempo will shift, when the guitars will switch from chiming to chugging, when drummer William Kuehn will move from snare to cymbals. There’s something to be said for songs that have an inherent familiarity to them, but everything comes off as eminently predictable and sterile.

If there’s a highlight here it’s “Failure,” which features some crisp guitar playing by Cromer to go along with the typically steady work from the rhythm section of bassist Josh Zucker and drummer Kuehn. Cromer also saves the vocal dramatics exclusively for the chorus, which gives the rest of the song a chance to breathe. Too often he is the overwhelming force, not necessarily in the manner in which the songs are mixed, but just in the sense that his voice combined with the lyrics make it hard to focus on anything else. The music itself is nothing especially interesting, but it has that basic sense of propulsion so that if the DJ at your local indie dance night gave it a spin, not too many eyebrows would be raised. And if any were raised, the thought would probably be, “Did he just say, ‘A bill of fare from which to glean feigned intimacy’?”