ontrary to what others might have you believe, some albums are simply best for casual listening. If you put, say, Everybody Has a Dark Side under any sort of scrutiny, it just falls apart. That’s why on my train journey home from work, the second album of acoustic alt-folk from The Theater Fire sounded great. All comforting, warm folksiness, twanging guitars and woozy brass, it was the perfect contrast to the usual commuter bustle.

Most albums that don’t hold up get the big picture right. The Theater Fire’s stated mariachi, country, and bluegrass influences come together because of impeccable playing, rich and varied without ever being at all fussy or cluttered. The six members of the band take on a range of brass, guitars, banjo and mandolin among others, playing all the instruments bar one song’s saxophone. “Kicking Up The Darkness” sets the scene with spooky pedal steel and rickety piano in its verses giving way to sadly wheezing trumpet for its questioning chorus, all over percussion laying down an incredibly slow march tempo. Not much else is quite as gorgeous, but the gentle swing of many tracks is just as effective in its own way—the playing always engages, even on comparatively bare moments like “These Tears Could Rust a Train” and “Civil Warrior.” Making such small songs seem so unhurried is actually quite a neat trick—only a few stray far over three minutes. One of these is the closer “Members of the Show ’Em How It’s Done,” whose big accordion and horn finale is one of the record’s finest passages, at least up until its uncharacteristically abrupt halt.

The album sounded so good on the train, though, simply because you have difficulty in making out the vocals that The Theater Fire have set amid such wonderful surroundings. Singers Curtis Heath and Donald Feagin (and you thought that it was just the band name that was familiar!) take a roughly equal share of songs, but their voices hardly compare. Whoever it is that takes “Kicking Up The Darkness” and, er, “Dark Side” has a deep, worn voice that’s a good fit to the music, but his partner’s weak whine suffers in comparison. Neither, though, ever really gets the quality of tune to make them the center of attention, tending to sink into a secondary role to the music more often than not.

Worse still are the lyrics. These range largely from equally forgettable to downright embarrassing. As if “Valentwine”’s title and corny rhyming (sample: “The best part of being me is waking up next to you. Will you be my valentine? I’ve got a heart that’s turning blue”) isn’t bad enough, “Dark Side” goes on to stick “even Darth Vader was a child” in the middle of its somber ponderings. It’s possible they could be going for laughs, but it sure doesn’t seem like it. Instead it’s just jarring—as if someone’s carefully set up a scene in a period drama just to have the actors emerge wearing digital watches. And when they do play for laughs on “My Razor’s Gone,” it’s even worse. No wonder they choose to just crib from Robert Louis Stevenson for the excellent and suitably laidback “Land of Nod.” Whether it’s worth looking past the transgressions elsewhere on Everybody Has a Dark Side is hard to say. It may simply be down to whether you’re on the train or not while you’re listening.