The cover art for Boris Smile’s Beartooth EP features a boy with a tomahawk, a cabin scene, and a hacked up pile of modern stuff. It creates a clever, frontiersman-of-the-heart mood with only one drawback: it has little to do with the content of the album. Beartooth is plagued by this kind of inconsistency, and it might have been more apt to name this EP after that impossible-to-get-right breakfast pastry, the Bear Claw: full of great ideas (almond paste! Light icing!), but ultimately cloying and underdone.

California-based Boris Smile is the brainchild of A. Wesley Cheung and his 20 or so best buds from the Long Beach area (disappointingly, Snoop Dogg has failed to make the list). Cheung has been inviting people to get together, make indie pop, and presumably crowd his in-house recording studio beyond fire occupancy limits since late 2004, though only die-hards would have likely hipped to Boris Smile prior to 2007’s Chapter I. Tubist and arranger Seth Shafer’s joins the lineup for Beartooth to ostensibly expand and darken the band’s orchestral underpinnings.

Of course, subcontracting a symphony to back up an album of melancholy singer-songwriter stuff can be a double-edged sword. Anyone bold enough to pull a few pages from the Sufjan Stevens playbook needs the vocal and lyrical chops necessary to pull it off. Unfortunately, I don’t think Cheung has ‘em. The brooding strings and choir melodies on the title track seem somehow too elegant for lines like “If he gets you, he’ll eat your face, and then he’ll eat your soul”. The melismatic, repetitive chorus, further, intended to push the tension of the song to a frantic precipice, ends up instead showcasing Cheung’s limitations as a singer.

The sparser tracks and the faster ones are more enjoyable. For instance, on “Program Me To Love”, in which an amorous robot pines for the software he would need to experience deeper emotions, the cuteness of the central conceit shines. The relatively restrained nature of this song (it sounds a bit like “She Don’t Use Jelly”) allows listeners to grasp the (intentionally?) contradictory experience of the central character—if that robot can pine, man, then he doesn’t need software to understand love.

Similarly, the crisply recorded twin guitars of Cheung and Avi Buffalo do an appealing dance on “Tut-Tut”, the album’s most up tempo ditty. It’s got enough changes and parts to be mistaken for a New Pornographers’ outtake, and on this track, Boris Smile finally leverages its considerable manpower into a convincing fullness.

Nonetheless, for a five song EP to swing and miss three times (“Hour of the Wolf” and “Books of Blank Pages” are awfully forgettable) doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the band’s editing process. Boris Smile has nailed the style necessary to be feted in some forthcoming Michael Cera vehicle; let’s hope they tighten up their fundamentals before Nick and Norah’s Infinite B-sides or whatever.