Alive to Every Smile, the new Trembling Blue Stars release, is not as obsessed with Annemari Davies (TBS frontman Robert Wratten's ex-girlfriend/bandmate) as the band's past records have been, but Davies is still all over this one. Alive is very much about grief--just what fans want from Robert Wratten's very lovely band. The LP ends with the sad sound of waves crashing against a lonely shore, and it begins with the following self-indictment: "You've got to stop fucking her up. You've got to grow up... " ("Under Lock and Key").

Wratten is a tortured, confessional character, and, like Arab Strap frontman Aidan Moffat displayed on The Red Thread, incapable of letting his grief go. But there's compelling grief and there's mundane grief: Moffat's, for example, is seductively tied up in booze, and has that self-indulgent sense of alienation only hard drinkers, drug users, and the mentally ill can ever claim. Moffat's grief is a fat, stinking intelligence that festers, onstage and off. It's chewy.

By contrast, Wratten's grief is lifeless. And yet the upcoming Trembling Blue Stars show is much anticipated around town, because Alive to Every Smile sounds so pretty and sad; it just makes sense right now. "Under Lock and Key"--full, woozy, and dreamily melodic--gets better each time. "St. Paul's Cathedral at Night" is upbeat, well-produced, catchy. But the lyrics fumble: "I know I'm in no position to miss her, shouldn't hold her so close when she goes; still I wonder what she was thinking as she travelled home," Wratten sings. It's honest, but sort of impotent. The song's tremolo guitar hook returns at this point for a tediously irresolute conclusion.

Fans of New Order and the Cure tout Trembling Blue Stars' likeness to both bands, and these comparisons are well-reasoned. Moments on Alive to Every Smile recall the Cure's Disintegration--the guitar and keyboard lines to "With Every Story," for example, seem very Cure-inspired, but they're not drugged-out and emotionally searing like Robert Smith and Roger O'Donnell would have played them. As for New Order: in sound and substance (no pun intended), this Trembling Blue Stars record could easily be shelved next to Republic and those other wimpy New Order records that followed Technique.

Is smart, clinical production and a safe lyric sheet the kind of grief sorrow-hungry music fans want nowadays? Are people (musicians and consumers alike) so afraid to let ugliness rear its very real and human head that the sad pop of Alive to Every Smile is going snake its way into every sensitive type's top 10 list for 2001? Judging by the recent excited word-of-mouth on Trembling Blue Stars, it's likely.

From "Little Gunshots": "How can you argue with what happens when our eyes meet, the spot we hit, the way we leave each other hungry? How can you argue with you and me? You're waving from a leaving train and every part of me screams your name: think again, please, think again." That's not a bad lyric, it's just too precious. Part of Wratten screams her name (the part of him that would say "BITCH GET OFF THE TRAIN, I'M NOT DONE WITH YOU!"), but that part is kept inside of him, nowhere to be found on this record.

So Wratten is moping, staring at his pretty shoes, and the girl is on the train. Maybe their relationship is over, regardless of Wratten's obsessions, and the song (the entire record, in fact) is just a bittersweet document of a man facing loss, moving slowly into a place of emotional acceptance.

But acceptance is anticlimactic in self-referential suffering art like Wratten's. Pop songs are brief, without any real narrative, and Trembling Blue Stars have all the makings of a great band. So, do we want to nod our heads at a little epiphany in a four-minute ditty, or do we want a real shot of something, whatever that something may be? Give us bliss, terror, joy, sorrow... a sublime, wide-eyed moment... whatever. Music doesn't have to be sad, but when it is sad, it should be genuinely moving. Otherwise, it's just familiar emotional rehash. And nobody likes a whiner.