It's a case of the chickens coming home to roost. We've never been shy of decrying New York City excesses here in Chicago, particularly when it comes to music: a once-great experimental rock band, a 0.0 rating, a fusillade of hate mail. We don't need to rehash the late unpleasantness. But at least New Yorkers can inspire such soaring vitriol; when bad music emerges from our own house here in the Second City, all we can muster is the bland pleasantry suitable for waiving someone into merging traffic on the Kennedy Expressway. The interminable flatness of it all.

To be fair, 33.3 are from New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University, to be precise-- and Plays Music isn't really all that terrible-- but it's Midwestern through and through. Produced by honorary Chicagoan Bob Weston and recorded here in Chicago, Plays Music offers up breezy, instrumental jazz-rock that seems to be little more than the reheated leftovers of Tortoise's TNT, The Sea and Cake's The Fawn, Dave Pajo's Aerial M debut, and occasionally, Gastr del Sol's Camofleur. The gimmick? I don't know. Do cello, trombone, trumpet or upright bass count as a gimmick?

Plays Music is nice. Nice like a birthday card, or nice as a tag that cushions the blow of outright rejection. A disappointment from New York and the spleen writes itself; a disappointment from Chicago and we struggle to string together every non-committal compliment that comes to mind: Plays Music is thoughtful. Plays Music is sweet to say that. Plays Music is not your type. Plays Music is a terrific guy but you aren't really looking for someone right now. And why should you be? The heyday of midwestern post-rock was a different time for us. You are so not that person anymore.

Perhaps I'm doing this wrong. Maybe this should be: why do smart indie kids make bad decisions? Why do we make that desperate 2 a.m. booty call to Directions in Music? Is it because the sound extends in lush instrumentation and curls around you like an old lover? The careful bass? The faux-Brazilian strum of the guitar? The repetitive aesthetics of ambient mastered by the precision organics of human players? The fact that it's still easier to listen to jazzy than to listen to jazz? Chicago knows all your old patterns. It knows you better than you know yourself.

You'll give it another chance. You'll scream at your parents that they don't understand the way "Oval Cast as Circle" makes you feel, how it takes you back to the gentle ruminations of the first Sea and Cake album; how the brass-laden "An Open Letter to Buckminster Fuller" not only makes you pine for The Unstable Molecule but references a hip, misunderstood intellectual in the bargain. The driving, angular "Joanne Will" reconnects you with your Louisville post-punk roots without all the noise and shrieking guitars. Sure, it's sanitized to sterility but it's what you need right now. You're in a good place.

After all, is a little stability so much to ask? Not at all. No need to rock the boat. Baby steps. Plays Music is there for you, with its Grubbsian pluckings and lightly droning cellos. It likes the things you like. It doesn't have much to say but it's a great listener. It will always remember your birthday. You can feel good about yourself waking up next to Plays Music. Day in, day out for the rest of your life.

-Brent S. Sirota