A wraith-like figure, clad in black, trudges through a graveyard at night. Spongy gray fog rolls over the moors like a blanket of chill death. A lone wolf howls in the distance, followed by the toll of a church bell. The figure stops at a crumbling gravestone and emits a raspy sigh, his shoulders sagging even further. Are you depressed yet? Or just bored, perhaps, and wondering if the Cure ever got this overbearingly gloomy? Well, they probably did, but even then, Robert Smith would still have been much more tolerable than Sister Sonny's Lovesongs.

Plodding through the same desolate sadcore territory as Low and Tram, Sister Sonny's strategy has them eschewing the minimalism of the aforementioned bands in favor of a darker, more atmospheric approach. And it might have worked had there been any songs to make darker and more atmospheric. As it stands, all these sounds seem suspended in a sickly miasma of reverb, floating in place a few feet off the ground and unable to move.

Sister Sonny's ghostly guitars rattle their clanking chains with much drama but little purpose. The occasional organ or violin passes through like a presence barely felt. The vocals ramble on in low, whispery moans like a heavily-sedated Michael Stipe. There's also a brief stab at some Mogwai-like catharsis tacked onto the end of "A Girl's There, Her Boyfriend's There and She Says," but otherwise, the tone of Lovesongs remains at the same level of grinding catatonic despair throughout. It's all very stylized and moody, but mostly it just makes me sleepy and distracted.

Oh, and the title of the album? Haha. Yes. I get it. How delightfully ironic. Now could you please quit bothering me? I'm trying to get some sleep over here.

-Nick Mirov