Billing themselves as "sad girl piano rock," The Landing need nothing so much as a kick in the pants. Currently, they're on the lookout for a bassist, which could turn things up a notch, but at the moment the ratio of mope to abrasion is listing towards something of a monochrome depressiveness. So while the instincts and talent are unmistakable, it's hard to look at The Landing EP as anything but an agreeable warm-up.

The EP collects three shambolic tunes that move along a largely structureless Zoloft drift endemic to the 21st century, with Lilly Wolfson pressing beautiful cabaret triads and suspensions on piano under her admittedly sexy vocals. Some muscle is evident in the scraping guitar and stressfully hushed drumming, but the group's pervasive, melancholy textures preclude any freakouts, even when such harrowing breakdowns are foreshadowed. "City Lights" in particular threatens a squall, building into its stairway-climbing hook without quite nailing the release of tension. Something in there wants to be beefier, uglier, and a whole lot louder: it's audible in the singing, too, which brushes up against glottal punk but veers back towards the pretty once too often, refusing to give voice to a hallucinatory anger buried somewhere in a pile of prescription drugs. The Landing would do better to shed their medicated civility.