There's somethin' just indescribably cool about having the keyboard as your most trusty instrument. Twiddle all the electro-fuzz that you want, or go town on the rotating voices effect, trying your darnedest to fuck it all up, and you're still left with a steady strain of open-faced melody. Of course, it also helps when you're blessed with Baby Dayliner's Ian Curtis-meets-Tom-Jones voiceover to keep everything from splattering together and making us think it's electroclash gone awry (again). In fact, to label High Heart and Low Estate as anything at all would be to misrepresent its manifold influences -- the deceptive coyness of Ben Folds in the opener "Raid!," the Belle & Sebastian wistfulness of "Madeline," and the Streets' perverse street wisdom in "Hoodlums in the Hit Parade." He does spread himself a bit thin over 12 tracks with no discernable continuity, but the slicker-than-Rick barbs and surprisingly understated insights tell me that here's a man who has no problem with the piano being mightier than the sword. Because really, what's the use of a sword without rapier wit.