Pitchfork

New York art collective Lansing-Dreiden's focus is notoriously scattered; the group's music is created as part of an ongoing multimedia project. This deliberate jack-of-all-trades approach invites indulgence, and could easily be seen as a diversionary tactic to compensate for lackluster material. Case in point: L-D's A Sectioned Beam EP, the follow-up to The Incomplete Triangle, is being presented as both an album and a multimedia video art project-- but the group overextends itself at the expense of its music, which has arguably never sounded thinner or less cohesive.

Opener "Locks in Shadows" is the EP's strongest track-- competent 60s sunshine pop similar to Saturday Looks Good to Me-- but still fails to be engaging; the song is a fleeting glimpse at one of the band's many costumes. "Spectrum of Vapor" is a droning, heroin-spiked pop number embellished with woozy synths and hushed sitar but it meanders, settling for relatively uninteresting druggy ambience over structure.

The title track evinces another sonic diversion, this time into downbeat Madchester territory with touches of atmospheric dream pop. The song doubles as a soundtrack to the group's video project-- which consists of stark, picturesque scenes of plant life digitally mirrored to a vaguely hypnotic, kaleidoscopic effect-- but isn't remarkable on its own. An untitled track is similarly modest; the group's warmed-over Depeche Mode posturing is yet another deliberate and seemingly random image transformation. But again, the music feels primarily conceptual, and in practice fails to expand or challenge a conventional pop formula.

For a group with such lofty artistic aspirations, L-D's A Sectioned Beam feels largely tossed off and half-hearted. The long-running debate about the band's sincerity and artistic intent is a non-issue here, as the final product is undistinguished enough to make larger questions immaterial. L-D may theoretically challenge the traditional boundaries of pop music but in this case, mediocre material overshadows any greater collective vision. L-D's image and style is deliberately all over the map, but without strong songs the band's malleability and experimentation doesn't make for satisfying pop-- like the accompanying video, the music on A Sectioned Beam is all smoke and mirrors, occasionally pretty but largely forgettable.