This five-piece likes to call what it does “Gothic Americana”—but dark punkabilly it ain’t. Even more so than last year’s full-length debut, Putting the Past to Rest, this follow-up EP merely adds a little old-school alternative funk/rock to its ragged synthesis of country, pop, and Cajun, delineating a point on an imaginary timeline in an alternate 1994, where the Red Hot Chili Peppers at their most introspective collaborate with Social Distortion at their most atmospheric.

Whatever you call it, it’s a hard sell, because while his band has more than enough chops to pull it off—the closer, “Winds of Isaac,” sounds like U2 stranded in the bayou—leader Michael Cain’s voice proves too weak to stand out in the mix, as if he were stuck in someone else’s range.

And even when it does occasionally surface, it sounds pretty pretentious for a bunch of stylized roots rockers; you have to be loud and proud in at least a Hootie way to sell clichés like “It’s a funny thing about life / You can never hide from the strife.”

Not to mention a whole raft of overused water metaphors about the flood of emotions and the cleansing power of the rain.

Even post-K. Especially post-K.