Beast Rest Forth Mouth, the new album by Brooklyn based Bear in Heaven, is a synth-rock album reminiscent of 80s dance music. Themes of broken love are sung in Jon Philpot’s dreamy vocals that haunt the heavy aural cloud of synthesized music over this album’s 11 songs. This heavy blanketing of synthesizer (there are two keyboard players in the band) works on some songs, but on others only seem to mask the lack of real song writing.

That’s not to say Philpot’s lyrics are bad. Take “Lovesick Teenagers,” one of the album’s high points. Someone somewhere said we never really evolve past high school as far as our emotions are concerned. This idea is echoed in “Lovesick Teenagers” as Philpot sings, “Lovesick teenagers don’t ever die/ They live forever/ Even when you’re too old.” The song strives for union, the only way to combat the freefall of emotional turbulence, to “land on the earth before we crash into the ground.” The music works well here, too. The synth mimics the emotional freefall over the steady beat of united strength. More importantly, the synthesizers are scaled back a bit here, allowing the listener to hear Philpot’s lyrics. The synth serves to accent the content of the song rather than take over the song completely, an equation that works well.

In contrast to “Lovesick Teenagers,” there are songs that explore the benefit of breaking up. In the song, “Wholehearted Mess,” a break-up is celebrated with a snappy, up-tempo beat, a la 80s disco. “Don’t forget to forget my name,” Philpot sings, over the bouncy, psychedelic rhythm. In “Ultimate Satisfaction,” we’re invited to enjoy the “pleasant feeling” of “knowing you’re in pain,” that “there is no better form of relief than that certain knowledge you’re getting what you deserve.” Good lyrics, but they’re barely discernible over the heavy blanketing of the synthesizers.

“Dust Cloud” is another high point where the psychedelic sounds of the synthesizer work best with the lyrics that Philpot pounds out in time with the steady beat: “I want to kiss your mouth again/ and give up everything again.” Coming after songs about lovesick emotions and the pleasure in pain after a break up, “Dust Cloud” comes off as the most honest song on the album lyrically, with Philpot wishing for the return of love over the dreamy sounds of the synthesizers behind him. As his wish gets more desperate and demanding, the beat picks up and the song gets heavier and more frantic.

The dreamy psychedelia works the best on songs such as “You Do You” and the Industrial-esque “Deafening Love,” where the lyrics are simple enough that you don’t really need to know exactly what he’s singing, the very sound of the words themselves meld into the aural landscape of the songs and become part of the music.

On much of the album, however, the multiple layers of synthesizers are too overpowering. The lyrics are drowned out, the music becomes too dreamy. This would work on a psychedelic level, but even then the sounds produced would have to be hypnotizing, which isn’t the case for most of this album. The music is there, but it doesn’t groove, doesn’t make me want to dance, doesn’t make me want to lay back and fall into it. It barely holds my attention, in fact. The album could have benefited from a stronger guitar and bass driven rhythm section with the synthesized music used more as an enhancement. This would better ground their sound and make the dreamy psychedelia that much more potent.