I came up with a new slogan for Jade Tree Records: "Sign to Us and Start Sucking." Like it? I do. It's got a snappy rhythm to it, it speaks the truth in ten words or less, and it's even a bit alliterative to boot. What the fuck is up with their bands lately? Pedro the Lion signs to Jade Tree and drops the disappointingly chilly Winners Never Quit. While I enjoyed the Promise Ring's Very Emergency a bit more than most people, it's a significant step down from Nothing Feels Good. Joan of Arc? Well, they were never very good to begin with, but they've grown even less listenable, if such a thing was possible.

Which brings us to Jets to Brazil and Four Cornered Night, an album that makes Orange Rhyming Dictionary sound like Dear You, and makes Dear You sound like, I don't know, fucking Nevermind or something. That's how far Blake Schwarzenbach has fallen off his game in the past five years. Orange Rhyming Dictionary may have been a disappointment for many fans of Schwarzenbach's work with Jawbreaker, but at least it had a sense of purpose. On that record, he seemed to be flushing out his lyric notebooks and establishing a new sound distinct from Jawbreaker's old Gilman Street influences-- still a lot of rock, but not as much punk.

Four Cornered Night steers Jets to Brazil toward a more expanded, power- pop sound, adding a second guitarist and plenty of piano-and-keyboard sprinkles throughout. This immediately seems like an ill-advised move for Schwarzenbach, whose most successful work in the past has combined crisp, urgent guitar distortion with equally urgent sandpaper-throated vocals. Do he and his fellow Jets pull it off? Uh, not really.

In fact, let's make that a "hell, no." Listening to Four Cornered Night, it's clear that Blake blew his lyrical wad on Orange Rhyming Dictionary; musically, he spends the bulk of the album grasping at straws, either stuffing songs with a dozen half-riffs in the hopes that one of them will stick (most notably on "You're Having the Time of My Life"), fiddling uncreatively with traditional chord progressions ("Air Traffic Control" and "Empty Picture Frame" feature rather wince-worthy country inflections), or recycling melodies from older songs ("Milk and Apples," an otherwise peppy trifle, cannibalizes Orange Rhyming Dictionary's "Resistance is Futile"). The entire first half of Four Cornered Night is similarly spotty and dragging, with several tracks needlessly bloating to five or six minutes.

Things improve somewhat during the second half of the album. "Mid-Day Anonymous" hits its mark without recalling earlier Jets/Jawbreaker material; a disturbingly chipper account of a bell-tower sniper, the song's climax suddenly cuts into a triumphant acoustic coda. "Orange Rhyming Dictionary" steals the tremolo riff from the Smiths' "How Soon is Now?" through an insistent, slow-burning stomp; it, too, is one of the better songs here, but its title seems to indicate that it was most likely an outtake from its identically titled predecessor-- something that doesn't exactly speak well of Jets to Brazil's newer material.

But despite some regained goodwill, Four Cornered Night never fully recovers. Admittedly, Blake Schwarzenbach has never been an especially consistent songwriter, and Jets to Brazil seems like a band experiencing some growing pains. Regardless, this record ends up a pretty ugly misstep.

-Nick Mirov