Longwave's major label debut is accessible, competent, rock/pop/alternative. It starts promising with “Wake Me When It’s Over”, ends well with “Day Sleeper” and is sandwiched with catchy enough tunes, but it’s hard to hold down the cynic in me, predicting one-hit wonder status for the band.

I think it has something to do with their label, RCA… Lately, there have been a lot of rock bands on the label and, invariably, they sound like shadows of better-known bands without the longevity (I wonder what the members of R.E.M.-like Vertical Horizon are doing now). This is not the RCA of the 70s that brought you Bowie, Iggy Pop’s “Lust For Life”, some of The Kinks’ most ambitious experiments and, God forbid, Starland Vocal Band. This seems like a coup d’etat staged by militant A&R men.

If, in fact, Longwave intended every moment of this disc to sound as it does, I must apologize. And again, this isn’t a bad bunch of songs. They’re just trapped in that formulaic 21st century alt-rock sound, somewhere safely wedged between Radiohead and The Flaming Lips, only without Thom Yorke’s biting paranoia or Wayne Coyne’s acid-washed fairy tale aesthetic. Lips mainstay producer (and Mercury Rev-ster) Dave Fridmann mans the controls on the disc and gives the sonics a trippy, unbalanced edge… Again, the sound lands somewhere between Radiohead and the Lips.

Lead singer Steve Schiltz has a voice that also draws comparison, this time a hybrid of Green Day’s Billy Joe Armstrong and The Strokes’ (an RCA mate that helped secure the band a signing) Julian Casablancas, walking that fine line between smooth and snotty. His guitar, along with Shannon Ferguson, alternates between new wave stab and floating, spacey drone. But unlike The Strokes, whose signature sound recalled bands from a couple generations before them, Longwave reminds me of all too familiar contemporaries. It begs the question: would I be better suited with the Lips “Fight Test” E.P. or the upcoming Radiohead “Hail To The Thief”? In a musical landscape where rock is a minority genre, am I prepared to be so half-hearted? Sad to say, the answer is yes on both counts.

I wish the band well and hope that the next time around finds them with more personal ambition, but as it stands, the only strange thing about “The Strangest Things” is the déjà vu that comes over me when I listen to it.

RCA, please take note.

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