Formed four years ago, the Bandung-bred musical unit Heals grew to quickly become the city’s premiere shoegazer act.

Its hazy guitar sound — at once dreamy and aggressive — took the interest of Fastforward Records, one of the country’s most recognized independent labels.

Through Fastforward, Heals has just released its debut album, the confident and compact Spectrum.

Though it would be unfair to ever compare any album’s sound to one particular perceived-influence, it is almost impossible to listen to Spectrum and not think of once-promising British band My Vitriol.

Heals’ overall arrangements and instrument-layering preference owes plenty to My Vitriol’s Nirvana/early-Foo-Fighters-meets-My-Bloody-Valentine approach.

Still, the band — vocalist-guitarist Alyuadi Febryansyah, guitarists Reza Arinal and Muhammad Ramdhan, bassist Octavia Variana and drummer Adi Reza — manages to conjure plenty of pleasant songwriting throughout. At the very least, Heals differentiates from that key influence in this aspect with a little more dash of monotony in the songwriting department.

Alyuadi’s vocals tend to stay within a certain register and not move much outside of those lines.

For better or worse, there are less dynamics within Heals’ sound, giving it a slightly more-morose nuance than My Vitriol.

Setting aside the overt-influence debacle, the album’s strongest element is its production, which aims for a United States-radio type of bombastic grandiosity.

The rhythm section sounds — to utilize an overused sentiment — massive while the blankets of echoing-guitars lie on top of it with a buttery overdrive that is crunchy without losing its crispy details.

All the instruments shine throughout, and the band’s sense of space and interplay are similarly strong. The guitarists play three separate parts and they intertwine well.

The record opens with “Monolove,” a fast-train-moving rock track that, like all the tracks here, will not run into any danger of being drowned out in an arena.

Save for the buried vocals, the song pummels throughout essentially starting high before soaring continually above.

As a matter of fact, this high-higher-highest dynamic is something Heals excels at.

Other tracks like the speedy “Azure” and quasi-funk-grunge of “Void” does the same, starting off where other bands may end up.

The only obvious change of pace comes in “False Alarm”, a modern shoegazing ballad of sorts (though it does eventually end up in a similar wall-of-sound crescendo.)

Spectrum feels like a record where the combined talents and musical capabilities feel like they have or should have grown out of the music contained within.

The aesthetic borrowing is something that feels especially bothersome even as one tries one’s best to enjoy the songwriting objectively, outside of the presentation.

With the majority of the song running well toward the five-minute mark, the homogeneous aping of its key influence’s template also registers far too often, and at a level where the listening experience gets increasingly wearisome.

The vocals never feel differentiable enough and while that’s perhaps the point, it might have worked better in singles or EP form.

To put it in the gentlest of terms; had these songs been present in barebones form — say, clean electric guitars — they might not have divulged hidden melodic gems, but they would certainly have been less exhausting to wade through.

As it is, Spectrum is hopefully just a mere early wrong-foot-forward from a talented bunch of musicians.

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