Ukulele and toy store keyboard underpin Ye Olde Sub Shoppe's plaintive songs of anxious love and low-wage malaise. The album lingers at mid-tempo, a mellow soundtrack for a lazy, rainy Sunday—or any other day of the week, as is more likely the case for the album's underemployed characters. The recording has a laptop lo-fi quality that flattens out the sound. The plinky instruments are pleasant, but no single song or melody is really memorable.

Lyrically, the band struggles, hamstrung by clichés, and the group seems partially aware of this; at times the singer himself seems to call attention to a hackneyed line in order to question it, but the effort falls flat. The worst cases are those in which overused lines undermine the singer's clear sense of conviction. On opener “Yellow,” Christopher Ingham sings, “Ownership is slavery/ but you had me at hello.” In context, the lyric suggests that the singer's attraction is so strong that it calls his ideals into question, but the cliché of the latter line reveals the hollowness of the former, more slogan than firmly held belief. This is a problem throughout the record: the lyrics hint at a level of sincerity that the band's too-casual execution fails to match.