Indie pop may not be taking over the world, but with all the bands crawling out of the woodwork lately it's certainly making a wholehearted attempt. Yesan Damen are often compared to The New Pornographers and Belle And Sebastian, both comparisons being quite apt. Chronos/Kairos is the second album from the Seattle-based band, and it is indeed the epitome of indie pop.Let's start with what's right with Chronos/Kairos. The tunes are catchy and Danny Kwak's vocals are pleasant, if not a bit generic. There are a couple of better-than-average songs: "Outer Space" is a bouncy spastic number about finding oneself. "Time Spent Elsewhere" utilizes hand claps, a bubbly synth and twangy guitar to craft an effervescent pseudo-love song. It also contains possibly the wittiest lyric on the album: "Well I'd be league MVP and that's for sure/if only bad timing were a sport". What's not right with Chronos/Kairos can be summed up in a word: banality. The majority of the songs suffer from lyrical repetition, both within the song and across the album. Danny Kwak's songwriting doesn't cover much ground, his two main topics seem to be lack of ambition and his (somewhat) recent move from Seattle to Los Angeles. Variation of instrumentation and song structure is also severely lacking, giving the entire album a feel of sameness.There's nothing offensive about this album and there's nothing, necessarily, to dislike. It'll more than likely have your foot tapping and you singing along. However, there are many, many other bands out there doing the same thing, only better. Chronos/Kairos has hooks and catchy melodies, but when all is said and done, it just doesn't have any distinctive qualities to set Yesan Damen apart from the crowd. When the indie pop mood strikes me, I will almost certainly turn to the New Pornographers or the Belle And Sebastians of the world before returning to Yesan Damen. 60%Links Yesan Damen [official site] [myspace]