et’s get this out of the way up front: I'm not a production snob. In fact, having worked as a recording engineer I’ve noticed over the years that the quickest way to mute the idiosyncratic charms of a young band is to trap them- deer in headlights style- within the foreign and unsympathetic confines of a commercial recording studio.


With the $50+/hour studio clock ticking away on one hand and the allure of so many $5,000 mics and other LED bejeweled wonders on the other, it takes a rare cool to succumb neither to hasty compromise nor naive indulgence.


The thrill of amateur production is- of course- the promise of the happy accident: the brilliant oversaturated vocal take, the broken fuzz box, the way a snare drum sounds through a radio shack PZM, the indifference (or willful ignorance) to procedure. In essence: the “rawness”.


Having said all that, over the past several days I’ve spent with bay area post something or other kids Inventing Edward’s debut- We’ve Met an Impasse by Midnight We’ll be Naked – my recurring overwhelming impression is of just how unconscionably, distractingly dull and lazy the album sounds.


In all other respects, the band is nothing if not ambitious. We’ve Met an Impasse... spends the better part of an hour vainly approximating its fairly transparent influences. The album commences with the sound of a film strip spinning, and then- apropos of nothing so far as I can tell- a dialogue excerpt from Edward Scissorhands, which soon enough gives way to a short untitled instrumental track (the first of several), that manages to inspire a bit of interest. A lazy but functional post trip hop rhythm groove anchors a minute and a half of aimless, but tonally interesting detuned slide guitar, Rhodes piano and accordion musings, which then crossfades abruptly and arbitrarily into “Defiant Coals”.


It’s after five minutes of echo-laden minor key arpeggios, portentous alto female vocals, and muddy tom rolls, as “Defiant Coals” mounts its half hearted crescendo assault (a few cymbal crashes, louder guitar), that the production problems which haunt the rest of the album first become apparent.


Vocalist “Shaye”, not a stellar vocal or literary talent to begin with, suffers as much at the hands of recorder Aaron Prellwitz as from her own shortcomings. On each of her tracks- half of the album, give or take- vocals are pinched into the mix, and given generous coats of bad reverb in lieu of detail and space to breathe. The lyrics consist mainly of bad high school goth girl poetry, intoned alternately in a forceful belt and a breathy plaintive cry.


The instruments aren’t given much better care. Front and center in the mix for most of the album is the exact same, stomp box chorus and delay guitar sound. It’s a mixing technique that is too familiar and prone to ever so slight finger flubs to ever achieve the psychedelia or otherworldliness that the band is attempting to create.


But it’s poor “Jerry”, the drummer who takes the brunt of Prellwitz’s sonic negligence. Over the course of the album, his kit never emerges from under an untuned, overcompressed, wet blanket.


By the end of the third track, it starts to dawn on you just how much time these kids spent listening to side 2 of the Cure’s Disintegration back in the day, and simultaneously, you start to wonder exactly how much mileage they expect to get out of this “two minor chord arpeggios with the same effects pedal preset on every song” formula to which they ‘re so stubbornly committed, when lo and behold...spoken word tracks and minor key piano arpeggios emerge.


It’s at this point that you know you’re in good hands. OK. I’m lying. It’s actually really quite an unwelcome development and makes one long for the warbling and noodling psych of the first few tracks.


Things look up around the middle of the album, with a pair of (relatively) up-tempo numbers that might have made a more promising debut EP. The Shaye sung “Man Flesh” has a decent shoegazer song buried somewhere in its muddy, ham-fisted execution, and the instrumental- “Listen to the Quiet Voice”- finds the Eddies attempting to reproduce the sunnier post rock impulses of Broken Social Scene, and is clearly the album’s strongest moment.


But after that, its back to more of the same: another Shaye track, then a slightly more adventurous track that mixes po-mo spoken word wank AND dull goth wank (wasting the nifty song title “Fuck Being Buried Alive”), and we close with an inexcusable 14 minute finale “Go Dawn Fire” that sounds essentially indistinguishable in mood, instrumentation, production, and lack of musicality from anything that’s preceded it.


Besides the above average pair of tracks that can be found in the album’s middle section, the only moments that really stand to recommend We’ve Met at an Impasse... are the aforementioned, nameless instrumental interludes. If most of the album sounds like a failed stab at integrating the Pink Floyd and the Cure’s dark, epic splendor and the nimble dynamics of post rock, these little snippets suggest that Inventing Edward also has a capacity (however limited) for creating the kind of hazy, abstract-lounge grooves that launched the Bristol scene a decade ago. They’re no more original than the rest of the album, for sure, but they’re brief, they sound relaxed and comfortable in their derivativeness, and don’t take themselves as seriously as the rest of this mess.