This Glasgow duo of singer Aidan Moffat and guitarist Malcolm Middleton are full of interesting musical contradictions — and plagued by one vexing conflict. Their heart-on-sleeve anthems can thrill with unexpected flourishes like backwards violin; they can flip-flop in the space of a couple of tunes from an unadulterated disco rhythm to industrial jackhammer-and-feedback flailing. And Moffat’s lyrics are personal and unsparing, whether he’s chronicling a night of drunken debauchery that ends in shame or singing about how he’s screwed his friends.

But damned if he doesn’t always sing as if he were sleepwalking, and that’s just not fair to the desperate turns of life that he’s chronicling, or to the often exciting ripples in Middleton’s music, which frequently seems to be fighting Moffat’s mumbly nasal, labile delivery to keep the songs alive. Granted, the pair spend enough time in down-tempo territory to make the point that they’re going for a mood — but after five albums of Moffat’s pathetic, drowsy mewling, it’s one that no longer evokes anything more interesting than arrested adolescence. This is a franchise at odds with itself: Middleton’s interesting layers of sound, which continue to evolve in ways that would make both Brian Eno and Annie Lennox proud, and Moffat’s exasperating foot dragging. Moffat is either pretentious or pathetic, and either way he can no longer hold the attention of anyone in better shape than a Prozac-deprived 15-year-old for an entire album. Bah!