British band Esben and the Witch didn’t wow with the Matador Records production “Wash the Sins Not Only the Face” as much as it could have. Each member gives off waves of enthusiasm in performances — the video for “Deathwaltz” is pretty intense, for example — but something hasn’t come together for the group yet. “Violet Cries,” the band’s 2011 debut, fit too handily into the “goth punk” genre, and the band insisted in interviews that its sophomore effort would be drastically different. Largely, it isn’t. It feels nostalgic, with the arrangements coming off as passé and unoriginal. The vocals in “Wash” are nice enough, but bland and largely unintelligible. The instrumentation moved too quickly for the doleful vocals warbling around them. The most I can say for Esben and the Witch is that it has every opportunity to impress us, and it most likely will. Eventually.