Some bands do being literate in, and about, America better than others: in one corner we have The National, Okkervil River and the King of writing about people and places in the USA, Bruce Springsteen. Those who don’t do it so well might be best summed up in two words: The Killers. Always aiming for the anthemic storytelling song, they’ve sometimes achieved but more often than not left us with middle-of-the road tunes with repetitive choruses that go on that little bit too long. Los Angeles’ PAPA often fall into the latter’s camp, while aiming and clearly positioning themselves for the former on their debut album Tender Madness.

PAPA is the brainchild of former Girls drummer Darren Weiss, who after the breakup of that band in 2012 got together with his childhood friend (and bassist) Danny Presant, and moved to New York for a period of time to write the songs that make up this record. Now back in LA, PAPA really don’t have any residual influences from Weiss’ time with Girls, leaving all that group’s subtlety and tenderness to Christopher Owens – Tender Madness is all maximalist from the get-go. Weiss cites America, women and fiction as the major influences on his music (their EP A Good Woman Is Hard to Find was a clear nod to Flannery O’Connor) and while these are all admirable things to be influenced by, it’s hard to then make music that’s not painfully obvious…and this is where PAPA often fall down.

There’s good and bad to be found on Tender Madness; the opening promise of guitar-and-piano instrumental “PAPA”, which builds brilliantly to a noisy crescendo is followed by the very fine “Put Me to Work”; that track begins with a Springsteen-aping “one, two, three” shouted intro before battering-ram piano and ferociously struck electric guitar chords provide the platform for Weiss’ strangled (yet not unpleasant) monotone to yell out “I’ll be your junkyard dog chasing silhouettes / your shadow boxing champ only without regrets”. It’s all very E-Street and not unpleasant as a result. “Young Rut” continues in a similar vein: this time it’s mid-paced like High Violet before we get to (again) the rabble-rousing chorus where it becomes a stadium anthem. Although it’s very good, the early worry of repetition niggles, and slowly begins to rear its ugly head alongside the uninspired.

It’s ‘Forgotten Days’ which begins the decline; a bass-and-piano based track meanders along before hitting a chorus so cliché-laden that even Brandon Flowers might not touch it, and it gets worse with god-awful funk of “Cotton Candy”. It’s every bit as sickly-sweet as the title suggests and contains the unforgivable couplet of “blowjobs and cotton candy / all my devils treat me so well”. Shakespeare missed a trick with that one. That style is repeated again later on with the slightly more subtle “Got to Move”, where Weiss pulls out a falsetto over Cults-style 60s grooves….but it still feels a bit, well, wrong. “Get Me Through the Night” is basically every song by The Killers you’ve ever heard, and “I Am the Lion King” cringes on chika-chika guitar and Weiss gives up actually writing lyrics for the chorus and plumps for “woo-hoos” instead. It’s left to the swooning title track and the lovely countrified closer “Replacements”, featuring the vocals of The Secret Sisters’ Lydia Rogers, to slightly redeem things.

The problem with PAP and Tender Madness is that in aiming for The Big Music, they’ve ended up being bland, safe and obvious instead of giving us a record of literate ambition and huge, wonderful songs. To me, it was too easy for Weiss and Presant to make a record like this: they’ve not challenged themselves, and they’ve certainly not challenged the listener.