Whatever you might think of Apple, there is no arguing about the songs they select for iPod commercials: they’re happy, slightly obscure, and otherwise pitch-perfect. The latest is perhaps the best choice yet—a quirky track that virtually drips with color plays as a rainbow of iPod nanos do exactly that. The difference from last time, when a track from Feist’s darling-of-the-year opus The Reminder introduced the last iPod nano, is the rest of the artist’s catalog. With the use of Brooklyn-based electro-pop trio Chairlift, Apple pulled a big John McCain: lifted someone from a remote corner of the landscape and didn’t do much vetting.

Chairlift
Does You Inspire You
Rating: 4.8/10
Kanine Records, 2008

We know of this Knife fetish because the Swedish duo’s stolen sound is inside, outside, and all over “Earwig Town,” from the sinister bass line to the icy wind of strings that blows across the song’s glacial vistas. Polachek blends with a male vocal on a mysterious, minor-key melody that hovers barely inside the lower reaches of her range, as a piercing, demented-sounding synthesizer flashes and writhes like an aurora above. Nowhere else on this record do Chairlift manage to sound remotely sinister, nor do they ever again conjure the same sort of feverish, frightful intrigue.

Some of Does You Inspire You’s track listing is disposable, and a bit is even truly loathsome. Opener “Garbage” falls into the (snicker) former category. The intriguing lyrics immediately place you on lookout for the object of their allusion (“All the garbage that you have thrown away/Is waiting somewhere a million miles away”). The lines are piercing, evocative, descriptive. But something’s wrong, and it nags harder with every bumping beat of the drum track. By the second verse, it’s sinking in that the song is about actual garbage—which of course, exemplary vocabulary aside, instantly deflates its magic. A humorless electronic pop-trot about how much trash we generate every day? How very … Brooklyn.

Oh, and then there’s “Planet Health,” where the oriental overtones combine with its awkwardly literal lyrics to make one big awful, unintentional joke about Asian sex. (Memoirs of a Geisha’s icky “eel in a cave” metaphor has nothing on Chairlift). Start with the atonal chimes we all stereotype as Chinese music, add lurching early-90’s drums and bassline (think Amy Grant’s “Every Heartbeat” slowed way down), and then horrible phrases like “the garden of puberty” and “our intercourse was well-protected.” (!!!) Even if the song weren’t completely unbearable noise (it launches into a choral repetition of “Stop, drop and roll!” near the end), this would be difficult to take.

Those two detractors are glaring, but they’re thankfully the worst of it. “Evident Untensil” makes much better use of the late-80s twang-bass, and the energetic melody rises from Chairlift’s duller, more lethargic moments. There and on “Make Your Mind Up,” Polacheck practices to the Karen O. vocal warm-up tape, testing the upper limits of her range in a less-than-polished fashion. Both tracks throw down some nice ideas, even if they’re a bit familiar and have been better executed by other bands. And I really don’t understand why this band insists on making their generally well-written lyrics so tangible: songs about garbage, sex education, and apartments? And they’re not metaphors for anything at all?

For most of this record, Chairlift hover somewhere between the violently opposed poles represented on “Bruises” and “Earwig Town,” like a sine wave that dips evenly between accessible and bizarre. The two even out for a mid-graph trajectory that deprives the songs of their need to be mysterious, conceptual, and fantasy-driven. Does You Inspire You is a window-dressed shop of styles and ideas, the false starts and experiments of a band still deciding what exactly to wear.