After blasting off with the somewhat repetitive and monotone track I Am The World and continuing into the likewise shrill and distorted Who Puts Rock & Roll In Your Blood it may seem as though The Chess Hotel, the new album from the Indianan indy band The Elms, is going to be a drab and unrewarding listen, but once arriving at songs like I Left My Body And Never Came Back and The Towers And The Trains the album more cleary represents it’s purpose and the storytelling positively manifests itself in the lyrics.

The synthesis of the two mismatched styles creates an overall jarring listening experience that leaves one feeling rather irresolute about the quality of the album.

All the members of The Elms hail from Seymour, Indiana, and have been producing albums since 2001, according to their official website www.theelms.net.

The Chess Hotel is their most recent album and it plays as though it is presenting both verbal and musical illustrations of small Midwestern towns and high paced and annoyingly stagnate Christian tracks that try far too hard to be cool.

The clear Christian messages in several of these songs, especially in such tracks as I Am The World which features the lyrics "I’m the sun in the sky, I’m the darkest of nights, …I am with you for good, I’m the world, I’m the rules" are the most egregious faults present in The Chess Hotel.

These tracks try, unsuccessfully and with pitiful desperation, to make God and Christianity "cool," as seen clearly in such tracks as Who Puts Rock & Roll In Your Blood which attempts, pathetically and through an annoying chorus which is all one irritating note, to declare that some divine presence has instilled the spirit of rock & roll inside all of us, which sounds like nothing more than old people trying to be hip.

The good aspects of The Chess Hotel lie in tracks such as The Towers And The Trains which capture the small town imagery that the band seems to have a knack for presenting. Unlike the preachy loud tracks about God, these tracks actually changes notes as the song progresses and sport far less contrived lyrics.

"Nothing beats them downtown streets they can’t keep a dream alive," the lyrics which make up the crescendo of Towers And The Trains, actually have a rhyme scheme to them and are sung with a believable vigor.

It really, truly feels as though the band is playing and singing from the heart on these tracks. They are successful in instilling the mood of somewhat dreary small town life in a semi-celebratory fashion. To put it plainly, these songs feel real, while the Christian ones feel manipulative and hackneyed.

It is unfortunate that songs of such differing qualities were compiled together on the same album. It makes it very difficult for one to judge the quality of the album as a whole or to judge the Elms as a band. Overall, The Chess Hotel is worth listening to, but not worth paying for.