Pitchfork

Shrouded in put-on obscurity and not a little cocksure bravado, Lansing-Dreiden live by the totally unoriginal posit that image is everything. A collection of early-twenties college students transplanted from Miami to New York (where else), they've relied on the easily controlled written word to build a foppish, pseudo-intellectual house of cards that folds on even the slightest examination. Refusing to either play live or give face-to-face interviews, they pepper carefully constructed e-mails with oafish Aristotelian philosophy and that bold, naïve conviction exclusive to the young.

Unlike millionaire glam duo Fischerspooner-- an older, should-have-been-wiser flash in the pan-- Lansing-Dreiden did it on their own, buttressing their tedious "media collective" manifesto with a spate of extracurricular efforts. Taking a page (actually, many pages) from McSweeney's, Lansing-Dreiden started a blushing literary journal, Death Notices, in 2001, distributed during a summer vacation across Europe (starving artists they are not). To date, they've run three of these grey Goth tomes off the presses, all rife with stilted obfuscation, palindrome pen names and a pervasive, irksome desperation to be taken seriously-- a failing that, as you might expect, infects more than their writing.

But you can't ask for a more wonderfully ostentatious, artfully obscure album title than The Incomplete Triangle. Even without the effusive, melodramatic wordplay of its liner notes, I'd still have guessed our authors well versed in Edwin Abbot's famously circuitous "romance of dimensions," Flatland. Clad in geometric black-and-white lines and offset with a fetching logo, the sleeve is exceedingly slick, but the problem-- as with Lansing-Dreiden's carefully pruned backstory-- is that their obsessive designs promise far more than their referential tunes deliver. Which prompts the question, "Darling, is it music?"

Ultimately, The Incomplete Triangle is exactly what Lansing-Dreiden claim it is: Art. But I have to tell you, I don't spend a lot of time listening to Art. I listen to Music, and although it's clear Lansing-Dreiden listen to Music as well, they seem to regard it as merely a component in their ill-conceived, pluralistic credibility grab. Co-opting every form of media possible, they do as little as necessary to present themselves as participants in each, dropping business cards like The Incomplete Triangle in their wake. "We believe in reflecting surfaces and the many effects of smoke, light and night," they say. No shit, guys-- that's all you've got.

Because you see, Lansing-Dreiden is just a small clique of trying-hard art-school kids directed by one Jorge Elbrecht, a Columbia University student spinning an internet-savvy web of self-promotion and misdirection. His is either the most adorable or reprehensible con of the past year-- and you may find it to be both: Visually, the collective's art is very impressive, and showing at various NYC hotspots for good reason. The problem, which I explained to Kelly Konardis (the collective's media relations chanteuse), is that at the end of the day, most people are going to be talking about Lansing-Dreiden as a pop group, and both philosophically and artistically, that's a very lightweight medium in which to lob A.N. Whitehead sophistry such as "All Lansing-Dreiden projects are fragmentary, mere stones in a path whose end lies in a space where the very definition of 'path' paths."

As such, the band's academic runs through 1970s glam ("The Eternal Lie"), synthesizer-heavy new wave ("Desert Lights") and Arthur Baker's bag of tricks ("I.C.U.") play as lifeless extensions of a cynical self-promotion cycle. Grotesquely orchestrated to entice critics looking for an excuse to wax informed, The Incomplete Triangle is-- whether the band will admit it, or even know it-- a scam. Lansing-Dreiden don't care about music but for what it can do for them, and they approach it with the sole aim of being well-regarded, touching every base from Nuggets to No New York to New Order. Unsurprisingly, Vice Magazine is all over The Incomplete Triangle, giving it a 10 out of Rome-is-burning 10, but then, the publication is also cozy with Lansing's new label, Kemado. Ah, yes. Friends. You can never have too many.

To their credit, Lansing-Dreiden have tried harder than anyone I can think of in the past five years to build a mystery, to fulfill the curiosity they're so eager to invite. But the band puts any critic worth their salt in a position of having to resolve the extra-musical effort and rank self-promotion, which in scope, tone and audacity far outweighs the musical significance of this stylistic covers album. Lansing-Dreiden outright deny the duplicity I've accused them of, and in fact refer to themselves as "shy," but their obstinate pretension is a petulance I won't reward until they admit to taking advantage of a mistress I happen to love.