Localized Flashbulb Fires

If you have a kid sister, you’d be totally OK with her dating any of the members of Flashbulb Fires. Glory is an album that nearly guarantees the band’s nice-guy status. Singer Patrick McGuire alternates between piano and acoustic guitar, leading the band through radio-friendly indie pop, painstakingly letting us know that he’s a sensitive guy, troubled by the world around him. “Et Lux Perpetua” shows that McGuire is fond of vague, emo, wrist-slashing metaphors, while “Pyramid Scheme” proves he isn’t like those rebellious jerks in other bands. Heck, in “Sleep Money Dawn,” McGuire practically guarantees he’s ready to settle down and start a family when he tells us, “Kissing your neck made me an honest man.” If Glory is any measure of good behavior, Flashbulb Fires are stable, respectful fellas.

If you have a kid brother, you’d probably tell him to find some cooler friends than Flashbulb Fires— the Fray/Coldplay piano-rock mimicry is patronizing, and the band veers from a lowest-common-denominator approach to pepper Glory with all kinds of boring indie trappings. Tracks tangle roots guitar in unnecessary brass and string layers, sending the album tripping over itself with a dominating adult-contemporary aesthetic. “Rope And River” mixes up the mom-rock piano with a heavy ambient backbone, as “Heavy Hands” trades traditional pop values for an orchestrated chaos best suited for college radio—not lucrative pop station spins.

Well-mannered sensitivity and commercial-radio panache alone can’t carry Glory, as Flashbulb Fires sinks into the predictable morass of a band writing songs with the hope of landing itself on a Twilight soundtrack, or some other cutesy, romantic film your kid sister would swoon for. But for most everyone else on the planet, Flashbulb Fires’ Glory isn’t worth its contemporary rock niceties. Grade: C+