We Are the Physics’ latest (and second) album Your Friend, the Atom is a real head-scratcher. Not because it and the band’s conceptual hook is a very scientific one – concentrations ranging from physics to robotics to medicine to computer science. No, this album is mentally-straining because of how incredibly difficult it is to find moments of true originality within. They do appear, but not nearly as often as do the stylistic ID cards of much more popular new wave-revival bands that predate them by half a decade or more, of the kind that even their name calls to mind (see: We Are Scientists).

The band that WATP are stealing the majority of their tricks from most blatantly is the Futureheads. You can hear it in the weird vocal mania, angular harmonies, and jigsaw guitar riffs, which appear on most of their songs. (It also is apparent that WATP are channelling Devo, but only in precisely the same way the Futureheads are, which can’t be a coincidence.) Much of the album feels just like an elongated version of “Robot” from the Futureheads’ eponymous 2004 debut; take the song ‘(e.g. Apollo 11)’, which mixes karate-chop riffing, odd-chord combinations, and vocals which race to match the amphetamine-addled momentum of the instrumentation. Listen to the call-and-response lead-harmony exchanges – “I control the (subject versus subject)/I control the (subject versus subject)…”–and it’s easy to forget Ross Millard and Barry Hyde aren’t actually members of this band.

Elsewhere there are hints and samples of most every other topical neo-new wave act, essentially taking the best of every well-received debut from the last decade and forging it all into something We Are the Physics call their own. The song ‘Napoleon Loves Josephine’ is their idea of a track from Franz Ferdinand’s eponymous 2004 debut (they even cop FF’s apparent fondness for European history). The track that ‘Napoleon’ most aspires to be is ‘Jacqueline‘, but it’s too caught up in evoking the style of Franz Ferdinand to notice the substance lurking beneath all those breathless disco beats and precision guitar hooks.

For the tastefully-named ‘Dildonics’, the band starts to finally sound a lot like the band WATP rips its name from, the devil-chords and sudden disco stomps sounding an awful lot like the ones that appear in the song ‘Chick Lit‘ from We are Scientists’ Brain Thrust Mastery.

The band actually sounds best when they manage to break through the dance-riffing and ADHD-guided math-spasming which defines most of the album, achieving something approaching beauty with ‘There’s No Cure for the Common Cold So Don’t Expect a Cure for Cancer’ – which melds solemn instrumentation, some lingering computer components, Wolf Parade-ish falsetto yelps in the chorus, and a soaring, wordless geyser of emotion which closes out the song like fireworks.

The album appears to be, if anything, very aware and explicitly fond of its influences, which include musicians and scientists alike. Unfortunately, most the musical influences don’t appear to date back any further than the last decade, which makes for a very shallow take on our rich musical history. And although Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Robert Moog and Bill Gates have made a tangible impression on this band – audible in the constant toasts to the various fields of science, and the retro-computer beeps which play a major part – it is unfortunate that WATP don’t explore what each of these great minds might have been listening to back in their respective days.

Unfortunately, We are the Physics have yet to discover their own voice, in spite of how much evident value they place on the discoveries of others (scientific or otherwise).