s any newlywed (or new divorcee) will surely tell you, time and repetition have a funny way of slowly turning a select few of your partner’s initially innocuous tics into full-blown, cheese-grater-on-the-nerves-caliber annoyances. If you’ve ever, say, dated a Canadian, you’re probably all too familiar with this phenomenon. Sure, the accent’s novel and cute at first but man does it get under your skin quickly.

And so ends the Page France honeymoon. Not that …And The Family Telephone doesn’t have its moments: Songs like “The Belly of the Fish,” “The Ruby Ring Man,” and “Hat And Rabbit” all have the same quirky, acoustic, “Have a Happy Rapture!” bounce that made 2004’s Hello, Dear Wind into a modest indie-blog hit. But that’s the problem with Telephone: At its best, it’s successful at merely replicating Dear Wind’s candy-coated doomsday-song formula and spends the rest of the time struggling to retread old, hallowed ground.

What was remarkable about Hello, Dear Wind—and also, presumably, what attracted the attention of finicky music bloggers and college radio DJ-types—was then-21-year-old Michael Nua’s ability to tackle rich (and, typically, either kind of sterile or weirdly righteous) theological material with refreshing optimism. You got the idea that whatever Nua was singing about actually mattered to him, whether he was meditating on his own mortality or leading a simple, three-chord backwoods singalong about the worms in Jesus’ hair.

But, somehow, And The Family Telephone can’t pull off the same trick. Whereas listening to Dear Wind felt something like reading over the diary of a happily-curious kid at Bible Camp (err…curious about Jesus, that is), The Family Telephone seems to have been written by the same kid a couple years later during his self-conscious, gangly awkward phase. The lyrics—replete with references to liars, jokers, magicians, dancing bears, and apple trees engulfed in smoke—find Nua either at odds with God, or at least kind of somewhat skeptical of his last record’s hopeful exuberance.

In “The Ruby Ring Man,” he wearily opines, “I would kiss the Devil’s sheep / To get this halo off of me,” over the same endearingly clunky type of faux-AM ditty for which he’s best known. In “A Belly to the Sea,” he admits, “I told a lie / That someone bought / So here’s another / But this is all I’ve got.” In “Rooster and Its Crow,” he sings, “I blew a trumpet for a song I never wanted to sing / Now the apple’s out of season and I’m standing underneath its tree.” Throughout The Family Telephone, Nua gradually admits (through a handful of opaque metaphors and symbols that never seem to really accrue in any meaningful way) he’s newly “over” religion or he was faking it the whole time.

Both possibilities are pretty disconcerting, if only because what made Hello, Dear Wind such a pleasant and successful record was Nua’s aching sincerity and the immediacy of his delivery. It made Nua’s somewhat-limited songwriting chops sort of forgivable. But now that Nua’s turned jaded, he seems to also have become a little detached, and this is The Family Telephone’s biggest pitfall. Page France’s quirky charm was novel and compelling because it was so urgently pure, in a way. You got the sense that Nua had something personal at stake in the lyrics—he wrote about Christ like most guys can only write about girls. That was his shtick, and it worked once, but now it all seems a bit too calculated and self-aware to effectively accompany Dear Wind-style pop. …And The Family Telephone is like hearing a joke you’re not really in on, or hearing your girlfriend say “Sore-y” for the umpteenth time. It was sweet at first but now it all seems somehow tainted.