After Edmund is a group of Georgia-based music-school buddies who decided to take their name from the primary source of “literary” Christian band names—C.S. Lewis. Their fantastical press release describes a band that ponders things like “facilitating better art,” and proceeds to unironically compare them to Pink Floyd, the Beatles, Wilco, Keane, the Foo Fighters, and Muse.

Providing its usual voice of reason and sharp critical judgment, the Christian music press described Hello as “groundbreaking” and “wave-making.” Of course, this grandiose exaggeration sets any realistic critic up for an avalanche of balloon-bursting one-liners, so it’s only fair to give this record an exceptionally long time to sink in.

Hello provides the perfect platform for a discussion of “talent” versus “creativity.” The press materials are hardly lying when they say the members of After Edmund are talented—slickly produced as this album may be, there’s no denying that these guys can play their instruments. But there is a Grand Canyon between technical skill and musical genius. Many can be trained to play an instrument well, few can apply their technical proficiency toward original compositions that are truly groundbreaking.

Hello is only groundbreaking in the sense that the Christian music demographic may not have heard this particular sound—sturdy mainstream rock with British affections—before. But everyone else has. We’ve heard Muse use that rotating synth arpeggio that opens “Thank God” and My Chemical Romance do that roaring, chromatic chord progression and ripping, Queen-esque guitar solo in “Clouds.” Even the more interesting bits of these songs feel like a less-inspired imitation of something that’s already come and gone, and none of them add up to anything the least bit exciting. It doesn’t even really work as top-speed highway rock. (Yes, I tried it).

There are two truly good minutes of music on this album, and they come in the form of the piano interlude “Go Oboe!”—a classical sonata imitation that showcases one of After Edmund’s individual talents. The rest is—in the words of Walter Kirn —“skillful, but somehow not convincing.”

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