Angels & Airwaves

The first track aside, Angels & Airwaves' sophomore album I-Empire is pure pop-confectionary. It takes nearly a minute for frontman and former blink-182 member Tom Delonge to rain in on the lead track, "Call to Arms," and it's obvious that the album is trying to establish a momentum with the slowly building tempo sans vocals. When Delonge's nasally voice does finally emerge, the song proves to be undeniably catchy, which is odd considering you almost need the lyrics in front of you just to decipher what Delonge is trying to say. It's almost as if he decided that pronouncing words strangely is an adequate substitute for actual meaning. Rather than endearing, he comes off as pretentious and unnecessary.

The album is definitely rooted in the '80s electropop tradition-namely The Cure, which comes as no surprise since Robert Smith contributed vocals to the last blink-182 album. However, while superficiality and sheen may have been hallmarks of the genre, I-Empire goes far beyond homage to the point of farce.

The group relies on certain techniques far too often, from increasing the tempo to force a momentum that just isn't there to leaving last syllables off words, so that each song sounds virtually the same. "Love Like Rockets" is textured, with faded samples layered over crunches and under-darting chords, to the point of being too ornate. Riffs cross over one another to bear the weight of the song like cables on a suspension bridge: the problem is that-like on many of the album's songs-there is no weight, no significance or meaning for these cables to bear.