bland adj. 1. devoid of any distinctive or stimulating characteristics; uninteresting; dull bland food 2. gentle and agreeable; suave. 3. (of the weather) mild and soothing. 4. unemotional or unmoved: a bland account of atrocities.

adequate adj. 1. able to fulfill a need or requirement without being outstanding, abundant, etc.

Blandly adequate records suck. You can't praise them as harbingers of some Grand New Movement. You can't rail them as you would with the U.S. government's involvement with the Honduran death squads or a plate of moldy cheese. You can't tell all your friends about a thoroughly middling record you heard. There's no joy in taking a bland record and jamming it up your butt and laughing at how the funny noises that ensue are better than the recorded product.

The 12 songs on Ashley Stove's New Scars chug along in perfectly appropriate glee. Guitarists Matt Brown and Ben Barwick craft medium- weight guitar lines that shimmy by each other along the rhythm section. All band members share singing duties here and all of them are masters of earnest, yet unambitious lyrics. The production is suitably boomy and the drums have a nice, vaguely Who-ish thump to them.

But I had very little fun reviewing Ashley Stove's Merge debut, which isn't to say it's a bad record. In fact, given the current state of pop-rock malaise, it's in many ways a pretty decent effort. Were this 1994, this record might have sat quite comfortably beside my Superchunk and Archers of Loaf records. But this praise is precisely the problem. Had the band come off less as a Built to be Guided by Super-Pavement and more its own creation, it might have stayed a bit closer to the old hi-fi.

-Samir Khan