2 out of 5

Label: Secretly Canadian

Produced by: Daniel Burton

A pleasant – and innocuous – nap.

Windsor For the Derby, with its light guitar lines and whispy indie vocals and poppy, dashed-with-electro beat, sometimes hints at great things: a catchy hook, an interesting lyric, a sudden burst of drums or distortion.  Might this be one of those minimalist acts that repeated listens ends up uncovering a BIG sound?  Nah.  There’s some Bedhead here, maybe some Death Cab or the like, but Windsor is content keeping it all on the pretty mundane tip, and though Dan Burton’s spacey production is a good match, he certainly doesn’t push the band to develop their songs beyond that one beat or hook.  And to be fair, perhaps if light and breezy was more my style, “average” in this case would equal three stars instead of two, but despite some highlights – the consistent surge of the opening track, the vocal interplay of Logic and Surprise, the groove of Nightingale – I never found myself really getting into songs so much as just finding them acceptable, and then completely able to tune out.  More concisely: those highlights don’t build to anything.  They show up, and then the song just stays in that spot for the remainder of its runtime, almost to a point of frustration, where a pause suggests a transition to something else… only for things to pick up exactly where they were before.

Dig the album art and the album title, but there was the hope it would be wrapped around something that felt like it had a bit more soul.