As someone who spends a considerable amount of time listening to melancholy music about love (I’m partial to 808s and Heartbreak), a band named The Lost Lovers Brigade has considerable appeal for me. The album’s press kit says they draw from country and indie rock, genres that I like quite a bit. Yet when I finished listening to Little Skeletons, I found that it didn’t satisfy either my sad-sack loner proclivities nor my love for the genres the band plays in.

The biggest issue with Little Skeletons comes in the aforementioned genre mash. Lead singer and songwriter Elisha May Rembold has a beautiful voice, and it definitely would sound at home on a country record. But the music that dominates Little Skeletons is a sort of dreamy indie rock that clashes with Rembold’s vocals. The guitar work recalls both Bon Iver’s self-titled (the lead riff of “Lost Lovers” is pretty close to “Towers”) and Explosions in the Sky, and the production quality overall has a shoegaze texture to it. This does work sporadically, like on album highlight “Dark Nights”. But overall, Rembold’s voice made me wish she had explored more of the country stylings that her voice lends itself to. In the end, Little Skeletons finds a songwriter with a great voice being undercut by standard-issue indie fare.