Undersea Poem

Plenty of people — eight of them — contribute to this debut by the duo of Christ Root and Juju Stulbach, who've taken the name Undersea Poem. Yet it still manages to feel quite stripped down, as if the pair were largely performing alone. They set the tone for the disc with "Juju's Theme," a sweet little piece for guitar and wordless vocals that's redolent, not so much of the Brazilian-style music that characterized their work in Mosquitos, but a more generic, but equally warm, Latin sound. It's music full of sunshine, low-key but happy. However, the problem is that it feels more like a sketchbook than a finished CD. There are ideas, but they're not fully developed — six of the 17 tracks here clock in at under two minutes, while another seven run between two and three minutes. In itself, that's not a bad thing, since there's nothing wrong with brevity, but somehow it never quite feels satisfying, as if they'd been happy to work with what they had, rather than push it. In this past this duo has proved they can write good songs, but there's an incompleteness about this. It has its moments, as on "Menina Que Corre," but they're few and far between.