X Ambassadors, “The Beautiful Liar.”

Don’t get it confused, kids: X Ambassadors’ The Beautiful Liar is a breakup album. Its bookending children’s audiobook conceit, its Jung-for-beginners Shadow figure and its incongruous satirical skits may gesture toward some kind of intellectual import. However, when you skip over this stuff, you’re left with a rather middling—if slickly performed and produced—breakup album.

Listeners might reasonably ask why that stuff is there at all. There’s no clear answer in the songs themselves, whose lyrics stick too closely to standard love-gone-wrong tropes. Maybe this mishmash is meant to evoke the mental turmoil that frontman Sam Nelson Harris mentioned in a statement for the video to “Adrenaline.” “Usually I’m pretty good at keeping it together, but when I was working on this album, I felt like I was LOSING MY DAMN MIND,” he wrote.

Here’s a more cynical hypothesis: Harris and his bandmates figured that LPs of breakup songs are a dime a dozen in pop music, so they gussied up The Beautiful Liar to make it look like a concept album about… coming of age? The darkness that dwells inside us all? Some other pop-psychology truism?

Trying to find the answer can become annoying, especially when there may be no answer. That annoyance can get in the way of some perfectly decent pop songs.

The Beautiful Liar opens with 43-second track “Chapter 1 – The Little Girl and the Sleeping Giant.” A coolly sepulchral narrator welcomes listeners into the album, a supposed audiobook written by “Irving P. Neville” jointly presented by Interscope Records and “Random Books.” If you have a low tolerance for cheesiness, you might already start dreading what comes next.

What comes next is the title song, which is mercifully less cheesy than the intro. Lines like “You beautiful liar/ Your world is on fire” won’t win awards for wit, but the smooth R&B groove and the layers of beats and harmonies make it a pleasant enough listen.

“There’s something dangerous that’s waking up inside of me/ It’s been creeping its way into my psychology,” Harris warns on “My Own Monster.” The song doesn’t feel too dangerous, though. The opening minor-key riff sounds a bit like the one in Gary Numan’s “M.E.” (not to mention Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Heads Will Roll”), but the loping rhythm and crooned vocals are closer to Color Me Badd.

“Adrenaline” has a bit more oomph thanks to its steady one-two beat and some discreet guitar drone, but it ultimately goes down as easy as the two preceding songs. “Bullshit” provides a slight change of pace thanks to some ersatz blues slide, percolating beats and spacey production.

The narrator and his creepy baritone return on “Chapter 2 – Enter the Shadow” to introduce the titular figure, whose voice gives the little girl from Chapter 1 “a chilling sense of familiarity.” The scene is so clichéd that it could make Neil Gaiman bang his head on his desk. Not only that, if the little girl is supposed to represent Harris’ ex, it’s so condescending that some people might stop the album right here.

The jerky 55-second rant “Conversations with My Friends” seems to come out of nowhere, but it mocks privileged liberalism so concisely that Mike Watt should cover it. The 35-second “I Can See the Light” isn’t much more than the title lyric and a mid-tempo 808 beat. “Palo Santo” provides a companion piece to “Conversations,” attacking suburban complacency over a warped Latin rhythm. Judging from these two songs, maybe X Ambassadors could do a proper concept album on American society.

Then again, maybe not—“Theater of War” and “A Brief Word from Our Sponsor” couch the valid point that war can be an opiate for the masses in tired mock-theatrical/commercial shtick. Still, the former track gets points for its spot-on Jimmy Durante impression (ask your great-grandparents, kids).

The smoothly despairing “Love is Death” returns to love-gone-wrong territory. The bitter yet tender lyrics of the album’s penultimate triptych—“Somebody Who Knows You,” “Okay” and “Reincarnated”—are so direct and observant that they show up the blandness of almost everything else. Just try not to roll your eyes too hard when the Shadow pops up in “Okay” and the closing “Author’s Note” and oh-so-menacingly promises to “always be here, right here, always watching, always listening.”

Follow reporter Ben Shultz at Instagram.com/benjamin.schultz1.