Depending on the moment, Dylan ”King Dylan” Roberts’s music might sound like a rap-rock riff on Depeche Mode or an obviously suburban white kid rapping over the music from the chemical zone in Sonic the Hedgehog 2. For some, “rap-rock Depeche Mode” will be a musical agglomeration that should be punishable by death (or at least exile), but the warbly, screechy robot music actually meshes pretty well with Dylan’s masculine, rigid flow. In fact, if Heart vs. Brain is worthwhile at all, it’s for the way he’s managed to take one of music’s most often derided genres and make it listenable, even if it’s never remarkable.

Heart vs. Brain runs the gamut of lyrical clichés, from the bubblegum existentialism that seeps into every rap record that likes to think of itself as “having a brain” to a party jam that seems explicitly designed to be pronounced “paartaay” by DJs with symmetrical facial hair the world over. It’s telling, too, that Dylan’s obligatory white-boy send up of rap cockiness is prefaced by a recording of him telling us “No really, you guys, it’s just a joke.” It isn’t a lack of artistic vision or even ability that kills Heart Vs. Brain. It’s a lack of confidence. For all the fun Dylan clearly has with genre-jamming, he never once musters the chutzpah to tell us to fuck ourselves if we don’t like it.