I never intended to write a hit piece on the new Constantines record, but Dana has a way of twisting arms. I tried to stall: "Dana, I was going to write about what's wrong with indie rock," I said, "but then I accidentally downloaded that Arcade Fire record and, even more accidentally, I liked it." So, theory = fucked. But did Dana care? Dana did not care. She just got that hard look in her eye, and now I'm trying to get these words to stick together at 6:30 in the morning.

I first heard The Constantines when I downloaded a few songs a while back. I liked them, but didn't love them. Then, last year, my copyeditor and I went to the Village Voice-a-Palooza at Coney Island and caught about half of the band's set. Hoping to be entertained, I was bored, but I didn't feel as bored as The Constantines looked. This would be a chance for them to redeem themselves.

I want to like this band. My favorite Constantines songs almost rock, hinting at something more dangerous to come, and I hoped this record would explore that danger. But it teases instead. The first track, "Draw Us Lines", starts well enough with semi-tribal drums and lurking feedback and raspy singing, promising and threatening at the same time. But when the guitars burst it doesn't feel like a payoff. The beat doesn't change and there aren't any hooks and the wall-of-sound guitar comes off as the exclamation point on a sentence without a verb.

"Hotline Operator" employs a steady rim-shot and an echoing melody, the vocals come across as a whisper and that rimshot keeps the beat, again, promising. The beat speeds up and the vocals go from whispering to pleading and you just know something is about to happen and it does, the promised burst of guitar!, not exactly inventive but gratifying nonetheless. They should start from there, throw in the hooks, change the beat. But instead it ends right there, right when it's made you really desperate for some rock-n-roll.

I would go on but those were my two favorite songs on the record. Throw in a few slightly dischordant but slow-moving tracks, the obligatory pleasant-acoustic-guitar track and the even more obligatory self-indulgent quiet-song to wrap it up and you've got the whole record. But at no point do The Constantines ever threaten to lose control of themselves or of their songs. Sometimes they're sad but they never seem very angry, or energetic, or eager, or bitter, or sexually frustrated or fucked-up. But maybe they're just really nice guys who don't have much to complain about.

It wouldn't hurt for The Constantines to be more straightforward from time to time, to show some emotion. But I'm not sure they're even capable of it. Perhaps they're one angry band member short, and when they yelp out "Working full-time!" on what should be the highlight of the record it doesn't sound so much like an angry working-class demand as a white-collar bitch-fest.

But these are talented musicians. At times they approximate the minimalist angst of Spoon, but without the driving vision of Britt Daniels. They make pleasing noises and hint at so much potential energy, but in the end this feels like a band without an emotional justification for its own existence. They aren't honest enough to let you shake your ass and they aren't conceptual enough to really engage you. In the end, Tournament of Hearts sounds like a throwback to the mid-nineties, when there was nothing much to be upset about but your own uselessness and ennui.

Don't they know there's a war on?

Tournament of Hearts is out now on Sub Pop.