Over the course of three albums, the Russian Futurists' Matthew Adam Hart established a specific and successful indie pop template. Virtually every song wedded woozy or bouncy maximalist synth lines to bashy, blown-out drumbeats. Within this bargain-store pomp, Hart would paradoxically bury his most painstaking and precise creations, his lyrics, which were filled with enough complex and internal rhymes to make Cole Porter proud.
You'd be forgiven for wishing that Hart would at least slightly broaden his scope, but then again his albums each take up little more than 30 minutes-- long enough to enjoy his distinctive approach without growing sick of its rigidity. Perhaps he also thought a nice long break between Russian Futurists full-lengths would engender goodwill as well, and so after five years without a proper studio effort, Hart returns with The Weight's on the Wheels. And... not a whole lot has changed. It's hard to fault Hart, as Wheels is another thoroughly pleasurable album that proves his skills as a popsmith haven't rusted.
Though it doesn't affect the quality of the songs, there is one major difference between this Russian Futurists record and preceding releases: Hart has deigned to push his vocals much further up in the mix this time around, so you don't need a lyric sheet to make out his cleverly knotty, densely alliterative rhymes. As always, the dominant subject is romantic struggle and dissatisfaction, and Hart maintains his tendency to prize sound over sense in a way that might be irritating if he weren't so damn good at it. "Let's serve this nervousness on a plate/ Let's curb our words for impervious debates," goes an entirely representative couplet. That's not to say Hart can't be relatably affecting-- "Golden Years" finds him musing, "Drank my way through my twenties... Slept my way through my thirties," while "To Be Honest" [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| hinges on the slippery, shifting meanings of the refrain, "I don't even know what it's like/ To be honest."
Hart does manage to tweak his tried-and-true formula, albeit slightly, to help keep things interesting. "One Night, One Kiss", a duet with Heavy Blinkers vocalist Ruth Minnikin, treats sex with a frankness and joy that's always welcome in indie's less-than-lubricious environs. Meanwhile, the back-to-back pair "Register My Firearms? No Way!" and "100 Shopping Days 'Til Christmas" both subtly inject R&B touches, the former by way of a sample, the latter with a hook reminiscent of the Junior Boys. Wheels starts to lose a bit of steam toward its end, but as with previous Russian Futurists albums, it's over well before Hart's shtick turns monotonous.
