"Oh, Aviso'Hara! Please stop pummeling me with your with your testosterone-powered sound! My arms are too skinny! My chest is too flabby! I am not worthy of your atomic rock and roll!" So says part of me while listening to this album. The other part of me, however, just wants to smack them.

Aviso'Hara attempts the same marriage of the angular/dissonant and the poppy/harmonic ends of the indie rock rainbow that Chavez used to pull off with such steroidal beauty. As Chavez wasn't a Hispanic guy, Aviso'Hara isn't, in fact, an Irish guy-- it's four guys from Jersey with either a penchant for dada, or a fantasy of being math-rock's next faux-ethnic sweethearts.

"Our Lady of the Highway" starts off fast and hard with "Twilight Twenties." Muscular guitars duel under Ralph Nicastro's emotive vocals as Dave Urbano's bass and Benny Rodriguez's drums hammer away gleefully. The song settles into a nice loping rhythm, but quickly slides downward on limp vocal harmonies, trailing off into nowhere before hitting the two-minute mark. On this song, as with most others on the album, it's the band's poppier impulses that lead it astray.

While the next track, "Bradley Wake-up," holds together a bit better as a pop song, it's nothing special. When Nicastro isn't belting it out, his vocals tend to evaporate, and the more gentle verses seem only to fill the space between the anthemic choruses. The featherweight bridge approaches emo-level whininess: "I don't wanna go out/ When everyone's a walkout/ It's generation fallout/ When everyone's a copout." While the instrumental interludes are kind of neat (it's difficult to find fault in Walter Greene's guitar work), they don't do much more than make the rest of the song sound dull by contrast. The jealous lover's tale "No Return on Party Dresses" crawls by on its breathily ridiculous choruses, buoyed only by a few outbursts of distortion. "Goodnight Sweetheart" is as narcoleptic as its name, only waking up occasionally to deliver some generically alt-rockish mush.

"Accidental (Moron)" and "Dominate the Gears" partially recover the energy of the first track, and the latter actually manages to inject some of its devious playfulness back into the poppy choruses. Any momentum the band happened to be accumulating, however, gets sucked away into the snoozefests "Rain Test" and "11th Frame Lounge." "Give me the strength to die well," Nicastro inexplicably croons in "Rain Test." Why these four apparently virile young men have suddenly become so morbid is beyond me; the fact that these same demonstrably hard-rocking guys are giving way to the song's awkward melody lies even further out of my grasp. And asking for any kind of sympathy for the drag-assed lament of "11th Frame Lounge" ("Hanging out becomes tedious/ And I'm horrible with phone calls/ All the kids suck/ And all the girls ignore you") is really pushing it. Luckily, the guys find their distortion pedals before I'm forced to put the disc in a pair of briefs and wedgie it in effigy.

"Movie Trailers" actually approaches a glimpse of pop brilliance, but only by eschewing the band's more aggressive elements in return for a somewhat hackneyed acoustic arrangement with a fluid, pretty piano overlay courtesy of Greene. Nicastro's delivery and lyrics are more thoughtful here, and the quietly anguished meditation on life (by way of film previews), "They've always shown us/ Only the moments/ That make the wait worth the while," actually strikes a chord with me. But the song seems a bit out of place, especially when the noise returns with a vengeance in "Sonic Ego-Size," which builds from jagged arpeggios into a rave-out reminiscent of another band prone to overuse the word "sonic." This pairing shows that the band is as handy with a pop song as it is with a venomous riff. However, the fusion that the band attempts rarely produces anything satisfying. The last track, "Kids Shout," limps across the finish line with a typically soggy combination of weak sing-along harmonies and soupy, distorted guitar.

Perhaps they'll get it right some day. For now, Aviso'Hara aren't much more than those overmuscled softies who you know you could beat the living crap out of if you had the chance. But don't be violent with them. Just go home and listen to Ride the Fader. Everything will be all right.

-Brendan Reid