Forget everything you knew about Hellogoodbye.  It’s been four years since the band’s debut LP Zombies! Aliens! Vampires! Dinosaurs! paved the way for the neon synth-powerpop revival, and in that time a lot has changed for Forrest Kline and company — the departure of co-founder Jesse Kurvink, the addition of ex-Early November guitar/keyboardist Joe Marro, and maybe most importantly, a long and nasty separation from Drive-Thru Records that kept the band from releasing new material for nearly two years. Now free from their contract and on the band’s own Wasted Summer Records, HGB return with a near-complete stylistic departure, the daring Would It Kill You?.

The new direction is immediately apparent in the leadoff track “Finding Something To Do,” an uptempo Fratellis-style raveup, all swinging drums and gang-vocal whoa-oh chants, Kline’s voice eventually swelling to a Julian Casablancas roar. The synthesizer doesn’t even reveal itself until a minute and a half through the song, then only to add a little color, and is quickly swept up in a wall of guitars and drums. It’s a track that wouldn’t sound out of place on an Arctic Monkeys album.

But just in case you thought you might be getting a grasp on the new Hellogoodbye sound, they follow it immediately up with “When We First Met,” a piece of bright orchestral pop— brass section and all!—that is equal parts 90’s The Apples In Stereo and modern cohorts fun. and Steel Train. It all comes to a conclusion with rising Beach Boys-style vocals. 

It’s clear Hellogoodbye have spent a lot of the last four years listening to their record collection, because the influences don’t stop coming. “I Can Never Relax” comes on like an ELO track before moving onto twinkling chimes and a melody cribbed from the Beach Boys’ “You Still Believe In Me.” “Coppertone,” with its booming Phil Spector-style drums, sounds like a long-lost cousin of the Supremes’ “I Hear A Symphony.” “Would It Kill You” starts off in Elvis Costello or Joe Jackson territory, but ends up somewhere closer to Vampire Weekend or Ra Ra Riot.

The one thing that does tie Would It Kill You?’s sound together, at least loosely, is Kline’s ukulele. The band went so far as to release a Ukulele Recordings EP in 2008, from which “The Thoughts That Give Me The Creeps” and “Betrayed By Bones” appear here in rerecorded form.  The ukulele is the star of both “When We First Met,” an up-tempo love-letter to his wife in the form of an extended hair metaphor, and “You Sleep Alone,” a scorching fight song that veers closest to the old Hellogoodbye sound with its skittering drums and electronic blips and squalls.

“Would It Kill You?” is the sound of a band finally unshackled, discovering that they now have the freedom to sound however they choose, but overeager to exercise that freedom.  The result is often charming but wildly stylistically inconsistent, an exciting but somewhat incoherent mishmash of tropes that wears its many influences on its sleeve but hasn’t really synthesized them into something singular.  It’s a confused album, full of strong songs and interesting concepts but with very little tying one to the next in any sort of of grander vision. It’s an album that’s easy to like but hard to love.

Ultimately, Would It Kill You? is a bold statement that the band is no longer the Hellogoodbye you once knew — but I’m not sure anyone, even the band themselves, is certain of what they’re becoming.

***.5/*****

*This review was composed by Jesse Richman