Every so often, I’ll get this strange taste in the back of my mouth, and I’ll know it’s begun again: over the next several days I’ll have this strange but minor affliction where the air takes on a peculiar, slightly chemical taste. I still haven’t figured out where the smell comes from—is it something in the cold winter air outdoors, or maybe something intermittently wrong with my olfactory senses, or maybe something gone wrong in the kitchen next door? All I can figure out is that everything seems slightly off in the air, and though the change is only slightly perceptible, it’s also surprisingly annoying.

So who’s the band I get to tell you about after an intro like that? Sorry, Charming. I can’t quite figure it out, but something about your latest album triggers that same odd sense—something that’s only slightly off, and yet completely colours my perception of Turn Down the Lights. The NYC-based indie pop band has been MIA over the past couple of years, leaving us with 2001’s Champagne and Magazines to keep us warm. That was a fine indie pop album, running the gamut from the pseudo-funk excursion of “Downtown” and the light disco of “Let Me Take You Out” to more straightforward pop like “Guilty By Association” and low-key number “Charlottesville, 1997.” Coming off the likable college rock of Giant, Champagne and Magazines was a stylistic leap forward for the band. Five years later, Turn Down the Lights is an attempt to consolidate on those gains by paring down some of the variety and focusing on what songwriter Ravi Krishnaswami calls “indie-pop-soul.”

“Indie-pop-soul” still doesn’t quite encompass all of what Charming has to offer, despite the more limited palette this time out. There are definitely more songs that draw on a Motown state of mind, especially “Working Man,” “Stranger (I Will Never Be A)” and the title track. “Downtown” was probably the song Charming was known best for, so it’s not all that surprising that they’d try more songs in that vein. But it doesn’t quite work out as it should. For one, Nicole St. Clair Stoops is a great vocalist in an indie pop context, but she lacks a certain brassiness needed to truly carry more emotional material like “Stranger (I Will Never Be A).” For a band that looks up to Saint Etienne, they should know better than most that Sarah Cracknell’s voice only works well within certain parameters; she will never be a soul singer because that’s not what she does. If Stoops wants to pull off soul, she’s got to learn how to put some backbone into her singing when the material calls for it. Charming may be getting better at the soul part of the “indie-pop-soul” formula, but I don’t think they’re quite there yet. “Turn Down the Lights” comes closest to the ideal, partially because it doesn’t ask Stoops to belt out the lyrics and plays to her abilities.

Which is really too bad, because other songs on the album prove that Charming can still make fantastic music; “Lost and Found” and “I Was Wrong” offer up Charming’s vivacious disco-pop side and are by far the best things about the album. “Sunday Afternoon” is another winner, though it has the misfortune of being part of a musical triptych the punches below its weight; “Sunday Evening” isn’t bad but “Sunday Morning” destroys the album’s early momentum with a tropical island interlude that’s completely out of place. Charming also push their experimentation a bit too far, with several songs chugging along nicely until a mid-song change-up or an ill-advised stylistic shift during the bridge ruins things (especially on the title track—what the hell, Charming?). Meanwhile, some of the material the band used to do quite well—the energetic power pop of “Guilty By Association,” for example—is absent on Turn Down the Lights.

All in all, I’m glad that Charming has returned from the dead, and there are plenty of things to like about Turn Down the Lights. It’s just that there’s this weird chemical taste in the air I can’t quite shake…