Mae - Destination: Beautiful

Mae is a decent band for those listeners who play music for the sake of background ambiance. It is polite music, never tense or excitable; it flows from start to finish without interrupting a conversation or breaking your concentration. It’s like Death Cab For Cutie without the sophistication and Dashboard Confessional without the drama. As you can imagine, that is also the problem (besides the pretentious album title). Destination: Beautiful is so uniform in its instrumentation and trance that nothing really stands out enough for me to concede as exceptional. In fact, while preparing for this review I listened to it incessantly trying to find some intellectual, lyrical, or instrumental angle to write from, since I like to mention both positive and negative qualities of an album. In this case I can only state that it’s good and simple. [www.whatismae.com]