t’s problematic to talk about a band’s aesthetic intentions with any sort of authority; it’s important to remember that no matter how much a song may sound like a reference or a derivation of something else, it’s still distinctly possible that what you’re hearing is simply what the band had in their heads. Moi Caprice, for instance, probably weren’t using the soundtrack to a John Hughes movie as a template when they started working on The Art of Kissing Properly; it’s an album full of elegantly poignant songs speaking to emotions and urges which do bear out a degree of cinematic sweep sufficient to roll credits over, and on a certain level it’s almost unfair to hear it as anything else.

So why can’t I listen to this album without my brain flashing big neon NO signs all over the place? The Art of Kissing Properly isn’t a bad album by any stretch of the imagination—at least three of its eleven songs have found their way permanently onto my iPod, and they may well not be the last ones—but it’s just as pressingly not a compelling one. Put it this way: I guarantee you that you’ve heard this album before, even if it happened to have been made by Jimmy Tamborello or Camera Obscura or Keane.

I realize, of course, that I may well have just sent a sizeable portion of this review’s readership running off to the record store, which would be a problem if I weren’t a hundred percent convinced that they’re not going to come away empty-handed. If you just look at individual songs, The Art of Kissing Properly is actually a pretty strong album; Moi Caprice have an undeniable gift for crafting a tune, and when they’re firing on all cylinders, the results are positively exhilarating. I use the term “soundtrack music” to describe stuff that sounds like this due to the way it tints anything you might be doing while listening to it with significance; I speak from experience when I say the crashing drums and sweeping “Ooh-oooh”s of “For Once in Your Life Try to Fight for Something” has the power to transform something as mundane as a game of Madden into a cinematic experience just by showing up randomly in your iTunes.

But listening to it all together, that same experience simply starts to ring hollow, especially when you’re not listening to it in conjunction with any other activity. Trying to consume The Art of Kissing Properly as an objet d’art whose existence needs no justification would be an uphill battle even if it weren’t kissing cousin to eleven thousand other albums and songs; somewhere around track four or five, the album simply runs out of tricks to throw at you, leaving you with a half-dozen songs posing no challenge greater than daring you not to think “brought to you by livejournal.com” at their conclusion. Again, it’s not that they’re bad songs (and it’s worth remembering that Moi Caprice are a band of Danish dudes writing songs in English), but there’s simply no archness to any of them, and the album feels all the more emotionally monochromatic for it. It’s always important to leave the earth a little scorched—for God’s sakes, even Journey’s Greatest Hits had “Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin’.”