Pershing

Now that Boris Yeltsin is dead, does it matter that someone still loves him? The answer, at least if it's dependent on Missouri's Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, is no. While the band pulled off a passable, if fun, debut in 2005/2006 with Broom, the follow-up, Pershing, is a boring, careless record that tries too hard to be witty and hooky, resulting in something that resembles the indie-hipster version of the nameless college-guy jam band. Broom, of course, was not a perfect album, but songs like "Pangea" and "I Am Warm & Powerful" showed off a group with a talent for songs that managed to border between silly and utterly serious and somehow work. Such, unfortunately, is not the case with the follow-up. The lyrics are trite and uninteresting -- "Yeah, you're right but you'll be dead right/Yeah, you look alright, but you're dead, right?" from "Dead Right" is really not as clever as they think it is, nor is rhyming "oceanographer" with "court stenographer," "news photographer," and "map cartographer" ("Oceanographer"), the latter of which actually is rather redundant -- and while the melodies can occasionally be catchy ("Think I Wanna Die," "Glue Girls"), they're hard to remember once the song ends, neither unique nor fun enough to make much of a dent; "You Could Write a Book" even borders on the trenches of yacht rock. It's too bad, because Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin seemed to have the potential to be a fun, smart indie pop band. But if Pershing is showing the way of the future, they can consider themselves even less relevant in the contemporary landscape than their namesake.