For today’s post on the music scene, I am going to be reviewing Saunter – “NC's longest running completely unknown original band,” at least according to its MySpace page – or, more specifically, its most recent album, “Bustin’ Loose,” which came out earlier this year.

Okay, good news first: The cover art features a bunch of little plastic men breaking out of an upside-down birth control pillbox.

I don’t know if the band is commenting on the restrictive culture of the “pill” – presumably they would be doing so ironically – or the restrictive nature of modern concerns about reproductive health or maybe they wanted to say something about the work week and all they had to work with was a pillbox with the letters MTWTF on it. I don’t know. In any case, it’s excellent cover art. Cover art of the year in my book.

More good news: it only has six songs on it. An album, you ask? With six songs on it? Yes, I thought those were called EPs, too. But I digress. It only has six songs on it! This means you can listen to it all the way through without quite succumbing to the urge to blow your brains out. The urge is there, and you are close to succumbing to it, but right as your finger starts to squeeze the trigger, the last over-harmonized twangy chord fades out and you think, “Eh, what’s the point.”

The bad news, as you might have guessed, is that the six songs the “album” does contain are not unqualifiedly satisfying to listen to. The bluegrass-influenced riffs are nice, and some songs start with a solid, upbeat riff, but most every track just falls flat once the novelty of the hook has passed.

It’s just boring. The band sounds so unenthused about their own music – like they are just slugging their way through tracks – that it’s hard to even consider letting yourself give them a chance.