It's a rough deal when a rock band can't decide who their influences are. It's like a child left over from a divorce never knowing if he should spend his weekends with mommy or daddy. Okay, so it's nothing like that, but the effects are similar. One results in years spent in intensive psychotherapy and thousands of dollars thrown away for double sets of Christmas and birthday gifts, while the other ends in an incoherent, muddled, confusing rock album. All in all, I can't decide which is worse.

Unable to decide whether they want to be the Stooges or the Talking Heads, alt-rock imitators deluxe Nerves have managed to put together New Animal, an album that sounds like neither. Weak and bowel-tearingly boring, New Animal is 32 minutes worth of dumb, sloppy rock music that tries really hard to sound clever and not so sloppy. Listening to only a few of the album's 12 tracks will convince anyone that New Animal is the musical equivalent of an asthmatic trying to run a marathon.

The overwhelming problem that cripples New Animal is that it just can't pick a sound and stick with it. Mixing crunchy pseudo-punk with supposedly meaningful lyrics, this album can't decide whether it wants to cut its chest open onstage with a broken bottle, like a screaming and naked Iggy Pop, or wear a really big white suit and direct strange art films, like a slicked-back and quiet David Byrne. While this kind of creative tension might supercharge any other album, giving it a dynamic mix of brains and brawn, Nerves simply doesn't handle the volatile mixture carefully enough, and the whole effort sounds confused and sorry.

Tracks like the album's opener, "Die Tonight," try their feeble best to be ballsy and rocking. Sometimes there's even a hint of genuine muscle to the music. But invariably, the boys chime in with something "cerebral," ruining the mood with all the subtlety of your mom barging in on you while you're deeply immersed in the Spice Channel. The tragedy of the whole thing is that, if the band had stuck with one musical style long enough to actually get it right, their album might not be littering clearance bins around the nation as we speak.

The only way I can rationalize people actually taking time out of their lives to make an album this sorry is if the boys in Nerves won their record contract in a state lottery. Or maybe they saved the owner of Thrill Jockey from drowning-- I don't know. All I do know is that the circumstances surrounding the creation and release of New Animal better be something that outlandish, because other than that, this album just doesn't make sense.

-Steven Byrd