The biography that graces the back of Robert Normandeau's Sonars album is half-filled with accolades that have been bestowed upon the 46-year-old Canadian composer. He's a long time advocate of electro-acoustic music and sticks to the romantic definition of that term. For example, his more recent works concern themselves with "aesthetic criteria whereby he creates a cinema for the ear." To the average Pitchfork reader, this can only mean one thing: Normandeau is a pompous windbag, and this album is a pretentiously academic, passionless thing. But it's so easy to wield the pretension card, especially when the artist it's flung at would likely take it more as a compliment than an insult. I dislike Sonars not because it's pretentious; I dislike Sonars because it's weak.

The record consists primarily of pieces based on vocal samples of children or adolescents, and purportedly attempts to convey certain emotional states particular to pre-adulthood within "sonorous parameters." This music is not, however, the pure, aesthetically uncluttered depiction of metaphysical childhood mythos that Nobukazu Takemura has mastered. The pieces are processed and unrecognizable staccato voice fragments, paranoid and jittery. "Spleen" is asserted to be a musical glimpse at the sudden, unprovoked surges of melancholia typical of adolescent emotion. It wouldn't sound out of place in suspenseful "psycho" movies.

As articulate as the composer's explanations are, the pieces seem to flirt with the clichés of musical evocations of feeling more than they actually achieve those feelings. One particular portion of "Spleen" sounds like a red, pulsating wasteland sky in an Anime cartoon. Other passages may provoke a feeling similar to what you might get from watching some of the more outrageously campy segments of The Shining. The difference is, Kubrick played off the clichés while Normandeau considers them authentic. Plus, at this point in history, the intellectual act of romanticizing adolescence isn't a particularly engaging endeavor, either.

Another key component in this, as with all records, is context, which is at least as important as the music itself. And Sonars shows Normandeau doing exactly what one would expect from a veteran electro-acoustic composer in this day and age, both technically and aurally. I don't want to hear the paranoid chatter of voices in my head; I want to feel and hear something I didn't expect. I'm sorry if a university-educated composer over-explaining an electronic track about teen angst just doesn't do it for me. If this record were the b-side to the new Li'l Wayne single, that release might be my record of the year, but from Normandeau, it's merely passable.

Despite the overall mediocrity of Sonars, there are brief moments of true intensity. Bereft of any of the connections to the liner notes that will stubbornly linger in your subconscious, certain moments between the suspense-thriller backdrops buzz, chatter and thump with real, unadorned abandon. These instances are legitimately worthwhile, and suggest what something like Sonars could be if its ambitiously epic nature was tempered with objective editing.

Ending on a positive note, "Ellipse," the final and most recently composed of the pieces, inhabits a similar space to those that precede it, but unlike the others, it actually succeeds in triggering a gut reaction and makes the air feel tense and taut. It doesn't forgive the album's other sins, of course, but at least it makes for a memorable parting image.

-Michael Wartenbe