Portamento

When a band feuds with Kings of Leon just days after their record drops, one tends to expect big things. Sadly, these cocksure Brooklyn anglophiles seem to be running out of ideas within the Smiths/Joy Division songbook on their sophomore record, Portamento. After jumping onboard the post-Killers synth rock trend and getting his band Elkland signed to a major, Jonathan Pierce decided to shift to an indie pop sound and formed The Drums with bandmate Jacob Graham back in 2006. Their charming, bass-heavy single "I Wanna Go Surfing" was embraced, as was their innocuous, self-titled debut, even if it struggled to look outside their very obvious NME-friendly influences. Portamento tries to get away with another album's worth of all the same moves, and without the same first timer's charm. The woe-is-me single "Money" is so lighthearted and campy that it's difficult not to like, though an album's worth of considerably less enthusiastic material makes Portamento a tough sell indeed. There's no denying The Drums know how to create jittery energy, Peter Hook-y basslines, and cutesy electronic blips; it's turning those ingredients into memorable pop songs where The Drums fail to deliver.