Perhaps this is just the bitchy question of the week, but at what point does a band’s eccentricity become less weird than just plain contrived? All the quirks on Tallest Trees’ new album The Ostrich or the Lark are deliberate enough to read as somebody screaming “Hey! Listen to this song! Listen to how quirky it is! It’s SO going to make it on the soundtrack of the sequel to (500) Days of Summer!” Maybe it’s just end-of-summer burnout—who knows.

What do Tallest Trees—a duo comprised of Thomas “Trees” Samuel and Dabney “Voice” Morris—sound like? Well, Animal Collective for one, especially with all the little electronic squiggles and pseudo-tribal drums. The orchestral synths have a Patrick Wolf collage-pop vibe too. The emo vocals on “Love Like Blankets” and elsewhere are heavily reminiscent of Ben Gibbard’s work in either Death Cab For Cutie and the Postal Service. For an experimental band, Tallest Trees seems more like a patchwork of other influences than anything concretely original.

At what point does that start to become really annoying? When “Love Like Blankets” devolves into an electro-flubber breakdown that ignores all tenets of listenability, or when the opener “Human Voice (Echo 1)” starts out as a cool-toned organ line, adds some nice ahh vocal chords but ruins it with an overwrought Avey Tare-style chorus: “We are just an echo/We now remain a sound.” Death Cab shows up again on “Our Hands,” with plaintive singing and electric flourishes, but this track ends up not being so bad after the drums and background singing get a little bit tribal, livening up the otherwise leaden song.

Something about Tallest Trees’ music feels like they were going for a layered, almost cluttered sort of sound that would add warmth and power to the mostly tried-and-true lyrics. If you are a master of artfully layered instrumentation, you will end up with this effect; Arcade Fire did it incredibly on their recent release, The Suburbs . But The Ostrich or the Lark feels contrived. On Tallest Trees’ nonsensical website, their “about” section claims that “there used to be 9 of us. There are now only two of us.” It certainly sounds like they tried to sound like there were still nine of them in the band, but it only ends up as window dressing. Anyone with a keen ear can tell that the tiers of drum machine beats and electronic punctuation are the result of someone pressing too many buttons in the recording studio as opposed to a conscious effort to sound like a many-personed band.

Successes? “Alouette,” the first single, is a typical glockenspiel number with some Asian influences, perfectly poppy with a fun call-and-response chorus. Also notable is “All My Fears,” in which Dabney Morris repeats “All my fears are gone/All my fears” accompanied by a bright keyboard line and some thankfully uncontaminated-sounding acoustic guitars, building to a pulsating finish that doesn’t get bogged down in the details. If only the woozy “Upstream” could have maintained the same restraint at the end; ditto “Stars,” which has potential but is way too populated with beeps, creeps, and sweeps that sound, distractingly, like radar.

If this seems like a humorless response to experimental music, it is only because there’s no humor in the music itself. Animal Collective and Patrick Wolf perform their weirder numbers tongue-in-cheek, knowing full well they’ll be labeled “experimental” with some denigration. Tallest Trees want to be experimental and psychedelic, and try too hard in the process.

Track List:
1. Human Voice (Echo 1)
2. Alouette!
3. Skinny Little Wrists
4. Love Like Blankets
5. Our Hands
6. Finally Home
7. Stars
8. Learn
9. Upstream
10. All My Fears
11. Taming A Rose
12. We Were Just An Echo (Echo 2)