Here's a now-familiar story: Tiny band releases an album locally, becomes a music-blog sensation, then gets picked up for wider distribution. There's a second phase to the story in which said band, without really doing anything, becomes the subject of a backlash. And presumably there will be a third, in which all that hype and counter-hype gets washed away with a sink-or-swim second album, although it's still soon to tell.
Happily for the Missouri band Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, it's still riding a wave of phase-one support that's allowed the winning debut album Broom to go from self-released Internet buzz-object to properly distributed album. Filled with ambitious lo-fi pop, Broom drags '60s jangle and hooks down the same twisty path followed by Pavement and the friendlier Elephant 6 acts. Occasionally, Yelstin sounds like a band still extracting its own sounds from its influences. But mostly, it sticks to catchy pleasures like "Oregon Girl," or "Pangea," which gets extra cred for mining geology class for its title and the lines "we used to be together / why'd we have to drift apart?" Whether the fading of Yeltsin's Internet-bestowed limelight will prove as inevitable as continental drift remains to be seen. But if the band has another album as pleasing as this one, its clumsy name should keep turning up on search engines for the foreseeable future.