The guys in Chief grew up in California, but the band actually formed while three of them were attending NYU. That bicoastalism reveals itself neatly in the band's music. Modern Rituals, the group's full-length debut, blends NY backbeats and jaded vocals with woolly West Coast harmonies and mellow vibes, and it works in the sense that Chief don't sound explicitly beholden to any single sound or style. But having disparate influences is faint consolation when you're less than the sum of your parts, and Chief fail to be more than an amalgam of other, better bands.

At heart, Chief seem more or less like a bunch of hippies. Almost every song on Modern Rituals evokes a band of longhairs, whether it's the close, CSNY harmonies of "The Minute I Saw It" and "This Land", the stoned Meat Puppets deadpan that lead singer Evan Koga temporarily adopts on "Breaking Walls" (complete with spiraling My Morning Jacket-styled guitar figure), or the album's largely dippy lyrics, which hit their nadir on "Summer's Day" with Koga opining, "I believe when I go/ You will cry tears of gold." Chief's one good trick is occasionally tethering these free-floating vibes to something moodier and more metropolitan. This is most often accomplished by Koga, who, when he's not channeling Meat Puppets' Curt Kirkwood, prefers to deliver a deep, half-slurred croon that's a polite approximation of the Walkmen's Hamilton Leithauser. The hollow, lonely guitar lines and metronomic drumbeats of "Nothing's Wrong", "In the Valley", and "Night and Day" all balance out Chief's rootsy, Left-Coast somnolence with insistent NYC precision.