If it was ever possible to be simultaneously impressed and disappointed by an album, Bike for Three!’s More Heart Than Brains may well fit the bill.

The unique selling point of the act is the fusion of Canadian indie rap with European electronica. It’s an interesting proposition with much room for potential. Imagine a hip hop act stripped of the samples of “Tiny Dancer” or “The Gambler” and replaced by a sound somewhere between Vangelis and Royksopp and you’ll have an idea of what unfolds over the course of the album’s fifteen tracks. 

It’s a formula which works through “Nightdriving” and “Lazarus Phenomenon” providing respite from the bitches and hos of your standard rapping fare.

The album’s highlight comes in the form of “Can Feel Love (Anymore)” in which a father-to-be considers the future possibilities for his unborn daughter (“Will she think of falling rain as sad, beautiful or both”). The track is full of hope and optimism for a child whose destiny is yet to be determined (“One day she’ll find her own way to wonderland”).

There is a sense of eloquent poetry to the lyrics, small observations laden with meaning, which appears in scattered nuggets throughout the album: “The ring on your finger cut off your circulation” (“The Departure”) and “The trees keep our secrets/Eternity’s cursed them” (There is Only One of Us”).

But for all these dispersed pearls of wisdom, there is much filler. The songs here lack a sense of direction and are more often a list of observations than a coherent whole.

This is a pity because when Bike For Three! work, they do so with an almost elegant beauty, musing on regrets, past mistakes and an imperfect world. It is this that makes “Let’s Never Meet” so poignant and “Can Feel Love (Anymore)” so beautifully optimistic.

The album’s nadir comes with “MC Space”, a crass sounding track about a rapper (sorry, “Space wizard of rap”) from another planet who has come to teach the good folk of earth how to MC. It really is as bad as the premise suggests. When he explains that “sometimes my rhymes do inflict pain”, you can’t help agreeing with him.

It’s a primitive sounding rap song: the sort of thing you might expect a nine year old to have written for a school project about – well, rapping aliens, I suppose. If it’s an attempt at a musical satire à la Flight of the Conchords, it misses the mark by some way, and does the rest of the album no favours.

And so Bike For Three!’s album is a mixed bag of beautiful treats and not so elegant tracks. Never mind. There’s always the skip button.

Rating: 6/10

Format: Album

Release Date: 25/04/09

Record Label: Anticon

/www.myspace.com/bikeforthree

Originally published on noizemakesenemies.co.uk on this link.