Ben Gibbard and Jay Farrar

If anyone’s voice can capture the wistful romanticism of sadness by the sea, it’s that of Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard. On “One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur,” Gibbard and Jay Farrar—of Son Volt and Uncle Tupelo fame—collaborate to craft a soundtrack to an upcoming documentary about Jack Kerouac’s 1967 novel “Big Sur.” Lyrics for the soundtrack are entirely drawn from the novel’s text, but while the project’s concept is intriguing, the album itself proves disappointing. Though certain tracks skillfully utilize the duo’s unique vocal talents, featuring pleasant enough instrumentation like rich piano and sultry bass, the album suffers from poorly chosen and sloppily crafted lyrics, which are often weakly delivered over uninspiring melodies.

“California Zephyr,” a song about traveling on a Western railway, opens the album, and uses simple, sunny guitar and Ben Gibbard’s lighthearted vocals to set the expansive, American West scene. A rambling, pleasantly repetitive tune, “Zephyr” conveys a good sense of movement, as one can almost imagine peacefully sitting on the eponymous train, humming this tune as fields and hills stretch by. The chorus—“I’m transcontinental / 3,000 miles from home / I’m on the California Zephyr / watching America roll by”—perfectly captures the spirit of travel and adventure that characterize Kerouac’s entire oeuvre.

Certain other tracks likewise skillfully utilize vocal talents: the deeper, twangier timbre of Jay Farrar enhances songs like “Low Life Kingdom.” The song, which details the depths of Kerouac’s alcohol- and madness-induced depression, puts Farrar’s gritty, alt-country manner to good use. When he wails “I’m gonna die in full despair / and wake up where the atmosphere / is dearer and maybe closer to heaven,” one senses the raw desperation of a man on the edge of sanity.

“Willamine” starts strong with Gibbard’s hauntingly high vocals and a lovely, purposeful piano. Disappointingly, though, these rich, heavy piano chords fail to lead into anything more than mere pseudo-romantic whining. With lyrics like “We’re gonna get married / we’re gonna fly away,” the song evidently aspires to be a sweeping ballad of young love, but winds up just sounding more like an anthem of teen angst.

Frustratingly, a number of songs use poorly-chosen passages from the novel to create banal lyrics. For instance, on the track “These Roads Don’t Move” lines like “These roads don’t move / You’re the one that moves,” are surely meant to feel prophetic, but instead just feel insipid. As anyone even vaguely familiar with Beat literature can attest, Kerouac’s writing offers more beautifully composed images than those selected by Gibbard and Farrar to depict in song.

Unsurprisingly, the album’s haphazardly culled lyrics often resemble an incongruous mishmash of words that aspire to poetry, but largely remain trite and poorly-culled from the original text. Even if one didn’t know the lyrics were patchworked from a novel, it’s easy to tell that the songs are at least somewhat internally disconnected, as each tune fails to tell a complete story and doesn’t quite form a lyrically unified whole.

As a number of unskillful, uninspired songs demonstrate, the album’s collaborators largely failed at matching their individual musical strengths with the different moods of the album. Specifically, Gibbard’s sensitive and delicately emotive voice is best suited to melancholy and thoughtful melodies. By contrast, Farrar’s deeper, rougher twang enlivens gritty, hard-up tracks, but his nasally drawl drags down slower paced songs, making them sound whiny, not wistful. On the whole, this album, though fortified by a few well-crafted tracks, fails to adroitly engage its source text and the vocal talents of its creators.