by Johnny LoftusFighting Jacks are certainly sincere enough on their debut for Tooth & Nail. The components are all in a line -- raw, yearning vocals; rousing choruses and ripping power chords; muscular production that builds mood through by layering of clean and dirty elements; and the appropriate mix of quiet and loud, slow and fast. The problem is, with those elements so impeccably manicured, it's difficult to pin the Jacks down, or find very much definition among the din. Vocalist Casey Linstrum has an obvious admiration for Jeremy Enigk and the indie melodrama of Sunny Day Real Estate. But while openers Farewell Senator and Commons and Robbers are tightly wound rockers with an urgency comparable to the Used or Further Seems Forever's How to Start a Fire LP, portions of Dying Art of Life (think Some Say or Your Lurking Shadow) seem intent on following the Foo Fighters' tracks to middle-of-the-road modern rock. There's also the record's more atmospheric quotient, which does great things with reverb and instrumental dynamics, but also illustrates Dying Art of Life's puzzling shortcoming -- though Linstrum's lyrics are wordy, passionate, and even mixed quite high, little of what he says seems to resonate. We all fall down, he repeats and slurs in the wandering Photobook. Take all my thoughts and destroy them. The lines are delivered with appropriate yearn. But they can't extinguish the notion that Fighting Jacks' fashionable racket is getting lost in a search for its own musical meaning. The album hits a similar snag musically. The familiar pacing is there, and the guitars roar or drift on a whim. But there's a certain lack of definition in the material, and it soon washes together in a big beige ball of seemingly meaningful, yet somewhat meaningless modern rock. Some pieces of the picture emerge fully formed; New Born Thing finds a sunny spot above the claustrophobia that clouds the LP. But overall, Dying Art of Life might be the document of a band still unsure of the sound it wants to project.