On its debut album Conduit, Machinegum -- the multidisciplinary art collective founded by the Strokes' Fabrizio Moretti and featuring Nation of Language's Ian Devaney -- borrows a little from its members' main bands, but ultimately, the project proves it has its own personality. At times, the collective captures the emptiness of bottomed-out heartache even more evocatively than its members' other groups. Machinegum sets the tone for Conduit's overwhelmed ennui with "Kubes," where Devaney sings "What he says in the nighttime won't be true in the morning" in a voice halfway between a whisper and a croon as a wave of blurry synths threatens to engulf him at any moment. It's a distinctive mood, but not always an effective one. For every song like "128," where Machinegum's woozy murmurs reach affecting heights, there's a song like the cleverly named "Sugar and Vice," where the distance between the low-key vocals and the throbbing '80s sleaze of the music feels disjointed instead of mysterious. Fortunately, the band finds better ways of expressing its bleakness elsewhere on Conduit. On the morosely witty "Walking Habits," they wallow in the high drama of a bad breakup and poke fun at it at the same time; later, on "Knots," they let their listeners in a little closer and sweeten their musings on heartbreak ("We're not the way that we had planned to be") with pretty vocal harmonies courtesy of Erin Victoria Axtell. Machinegum brings some literal and metaphorical clarity to Conduit with "E.T.C.," a blend of Buddy Holly's melodies, Suicide's icy pulse, and Chromatics' crystalline synths that proves this band is as skilled at combining musical allusions into something new as the Strokes and Nation of Language are. Not surprisingly for a collective, Machinegum has a lot of ideas, ranging from the doomy synth pop of "Act of Contrition" (the closest the group gets to sounding like Devaney's main gig) to the eerie disco-funk of "City Walls" to "Deep Red," which alludes to each of those songs and throws in some frantic tangents for good measure. While some of its experiments don't hold together, Conduit is never dull, and its ambitions frequently make it a promising debut.