Good Weather For Airstrikes

Electric President, which is made up of Ben Cooper and Alex Kane, first formed in 2004, but for the first year or so of their career they performed and recorded under the painful-to-read Radical Face Versus Phalex Sledgehammer alias. After completing three albums in six months RFvsPS shed the atrocious moniker and changed their name to Electric President, and released the awesomely-named You Have The Right To Remain Awesome EP in late 2004. However, Electric President have really come in to their own on their full-length debut, which dropped last month on Morr Music.

Like Jose Gonzalez, Phoenix, and Imogen Heap before them, Electric President are another great band introduced to me by The OC (I know, I know, indie cred shattered). Their incredible song, “Insomnia”, was used to close out the episode three weeks ago (you know, the one before Johnny fell to his long-awaited death), and the song also moonlights as the best track on the duo’s self-titled debut. On “Label My Mind: Blown”, the highlight track from Electric President’s debut EP, the band merely hints at their potential, displaying a knack for extremely catchy songwriting, great (yet simple) guitar-based instrumentation, and lead singer Ben Cooper’s Pinback-esque vocals. However, on their self-titled debut full length, the band takes things in a completely different direction, which Ben comments on, saying:

“As usual, it was recorded in a tool shed and a bedroom. But there was a slightly different goal this time around. The idea was in to integrate computers into the process as much as possible, but without making it an “electronic” record. So a lot of the sounds started as acoustic recordings and were later chopped and sequenced into something new.”

This results in a wholly electronic sound that still manages to remain decidedly organic, reminiscent of the kind of organica (new term?) Four Tet produces on many of his tracks. While “Insomnia” is the clear-cut best track on Electric President, “Good Morning, Hypocrite” and “Ten Thousand Lines” are also stand-outs, the latter of which even features some Animal Collective-esque shrieks and howls throughout. To properly put into perspective Electric President’s development, I’d recommend downloading and listening to “Label My Mind: Blown” first to get a feel for where they started and then listen to “Insomnia” to hear how they’ve evolved.

MP3s:
“Label My Mind: Blown” - Electric President [highly recommended]
“Good Morning, Hypocrite” - Electric President
“Insomnia” - Electric President [highly recommended]
“Ten Thousand Lines” - Electric President

This entry was posted on Monday, February 20th, 2006 at 10:10 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.