I want to argue with the consensus on Pelham Six's "Caliper." The consensus, in the three months since release, has been that this is the band's most ambitious record. I do not contest the ambition. I want to argue that ambition is not the form of value the consensus is treating it as.

"Caliper" is forty-one minutes long. It contains fifteen tracks. Six of those tracks are over four minutes long. Two are over six. The band has, in interviews, described the longer tracks as the record's "argumentative center." They have described the shorter tracks as "the apparatus around the argument." This is the band's framing. I am going to use it.

The argumentative tracks are the wrong size for the arguments they make. This is not a matter of taste. It is a matter of structural fit.

A six-minute track is a long-form vehicle. The form expects the track to do something with its length — to develop, to refuse to develop, to digress and return, to sustain an idea across more time than the idea, in its first thirty seconds, has claimed for itself. The form does not invite all six-minute tracks; it invites tracks whose ideas earn six minutes.

The ideas on "Caliper" do not earn six minutes. The ideas on "Caliper" earn, in most cases, two minutes. The band has padded them.

I do not mean padded in the dismissive sense critics sometimes use the word. The band has not literally repeated the choruses or stretched the codas. What they have done is sustain — for four extra minutes per track, on average — the surface texture of an idea that has finished its argumentative work. The surface keeps going. The argument has already concluded.

A reader might ask whether this is a problem. Surfaces are pleasurable; surfaces sustained over time are pleasurable for longer; pleasurable surfaces sustained over time are what most successful records are made of.

The answer is that "Caliper" is not making a pleasure-surface argument. The band has framed the longer tracks as argumentative. The longer tracks fail at being argumentative because their arguments are done.

What this means in practice is that "Caliper" is two records, badly stapled together. The short tracks are good — sharp, structured, doing the work a two-minute track can do. The long tracks would be good if they were two minutes long. They are not two minutes long. They are six.

The consensus has read the ambition as a virtue. The ambition is real. The question the consensus has not asked is whether the band's ambition was the right size for the ideas it was trying to make audible.

The argument for restraint is not the argument for less. It is the argument for matching the size of the form to the size of the work being done.

Pelham Six know how to write a two-minute track. They have written several here. They do not yet know — and this is something I think will change for them, and which I am not making a final claim about — when a track of theirs is two minutes long and they have made it six.