By Taylor Long

If you were to judge an album by its cover art, one would think that Hot Hot Heat’s latest, Elevator, is pure brilliance. Although the front cover has absolutely nothing to do with an elevator, and suspiciously looks like the cover to *NSync’s No Strings Attached, they’ve clearly put a lot of thought into the design. The tracks are listed in descending order and there’s no track number 13-just like in some elevators. But suffice it to say, Hot Hot Heat put more thought into the cover than into the album itself.

The 2002 release from this Canadian group, Make Up The Breakdown, was the album that every wannabe indie kid absolutely died for and every indie kid didn’t want to like (but did). It was catchy, it was well-written, it was polished (but not too polished) and the lyrics didn’t make much sense, but by the time you paid attention to them, you were so sucked in that it didn’t matter.

Elevator takes all of those qualities in a different direction; mostly one that goes completely overboard. Instead of being the kind of repetitive that is fun and catchy, the songs are the kind of repetitive that makes you want to tell singer Steve Bays to shut the hell up. Everything is polished to the point that the band sounds more like a Top 40 pop group than a new wave revival pop group (maybe this is where the *NSync-like cover comes in?). Though the lyrics weren’t brilliant before, they weren’t horrible, and they fit the music flawlessly. Now, the lyrics are just plain terrible. On “Shame On You,” Bays laments, “running with scissors wasn’t smart / I tripped and cut open your heart / I didn’t mean to but I seem to / have pushed us back to the start.” Are Hot Hot Heat ripping off high-school students’ LiveJournals for song lyrics now?

As for well-written, there are very few songs that aren’t as irritating as elevator music. “Ladies And Gentleman” and “Jingle Jangle” are the only instances where a more poppy sound works well, and “Dirty Mouth” is the track most reminiscent of the Hot Hot Heat of three years ago. This drop in quality is most likely a result of the loss of Dante DeCaro, the best song-writing force the group had.

Fans have been patiently waiting for Hot Hot Heat to make an epic follow-up to Make Up The Breakdown that exceeds all expectations (or at least meets them)-and if Elevator is the response, it looks like we have to keep on waiting.