If misery was an ice cream flavor, I think it'd be Strawberry Cheesecake. If you didn't get a chance to taste it during its brief heyday, be grateful. Now children, if misery were a band, who would it be? The Cure? Not these days. Those boys have clearly been suffering from happiness ever since Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me. Hmm... What about Tindersticks? Well, close, but that's English Misery, which is much wetter than overall misery. No, I'm going for the Radar Bros. This eponomyous second release by the Brothers Three is a heavy dose of slow and sad, hold tha mustard.

The peeling pastels of Radar Bros. are as minimalistic as they are suffocating. A bass, drum, guitar and voice, rarely sharing the same moment musically, gently crack from the ceiling and drift to the floor, drawing still- life portraits of everyday pains. Creeping forward, barely alive, the songs strum pitifully along, practically sapping the life out of the listener. At this moment, the effort to simply write "effort" is enormous, almost as enormous as the dilemma between tearing this CD out of the CD player or stabbing my wrists with a broken Colt 45 bottle. I'm going to opt for removing the disc.

-James P. Wisdom