Numb.er, Goodbye

[Felte]
Grade: C

Numb.er leader Jeff Fribourg has a day job in photography and graphic design, and the gray-hued post-punk he creates has a similarly artful construction and artificial remove. All the right aesthetic elements are there: plodding, motorik drumbeats; driving bass lines; dour, minimalist guitars; tastefully analog synths. Fribourg even apes a distinctly British snarl in his otherwise anesthetized vocals, which seem to openly sneer at melody. Yet the L.A. band’s debut, (maybe) cheekily titled Goodbye, feels like little more than a set of carefully chosen typefaces, creating only the stylized illusion of genuine expression. Numb.er often evokes the bleak timbres of bands like Wire, Magazine, and the broodier sides of New Order, along with more contemporary groups such as The Soft Moon, and it’s an amalgam with plenty of attractive, expertly curated style. But the frustrating lack of memorable hooks and lyrics that wallow in boilerplate goth-kid disaffection don’t do much to distinguish the band beyond its borrowed cool.

RIYL: Gloom and vaguely defined doom. Swaying glumly in chic black clothes. All the Factory Records-era bands that didn’t get famous.

Start here: “Without Bloom” is an exception to the album’s uniform lethargy, an uptempo number resembling a slightly more bitter The Wake that’s built on a jangling guitar figure and a modulated synth drone, and whose male-female “la la la” harmonies create a song you could sing along to. [Sean O’Neal]

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