The Violent Blue - Electric President

The Violent Blue

Electric President
Fake Four Records.

SCQ Rating: 87%

One great album reflects a great album; two great albums suggest a great band. At least that’s the way I’ve always seen it, and anticipating Electric President’s follow-up to Sleep Well – a record that landed #1 on SCQ’s Top Albums of 2008, and recently #27 on SCQ’s Top Fifty Albums of the 00s – had me dancing between the fine details that separate one-off brilliance from long-term artistic integrity. That Electric President prove themselves capable of building a legacy, underappreciated as it currently is, with The Violent Blue isn’t a huge surprise to me – after all, Ben Cooper’s giveaway project Patients had me completely smitten last year – but how this new album reveals facets of the Jacksonville duo’s unheard strengths is truly a surprise.

Originally planned as a B-side release from the Sleep Well sessions, The Violent Blue earned its own coattails as Cooper’s love-letter to the ocean, where he spent much of this past summer swimming and writing. Ever the masters in sequencing, Cooper and Alex Kane treat The Violent Blue as if a massive body of water, arranging tracks that surge then swell, in waves that either crest or topple. In that respect, ‘The Ocean Floor’ merely laps the coast; ushered in on lethargic acoustic chords and sweet ambience, it tenders a calm that largely pervades the record’s first half. Not to say that these tracks are anything less than arresting. ‘Feathers’ is arguably the band’s most accessible love song and ‘Safe and Sound’, while sticking with the acoustic and piano, provides The Violent Blue’s first significant wave with a bright campfire-esque song Sleep Well couldn’t have imagined. For those listeners hoping this audible calm foreshadows a storm, Electric President don’t disappoint, incorporating blasts of electric guitars among their graceful doses of haze. If the title track’s climactic release finds Cooper and Kane touching upon shoegaze, their distortion-loving eruption at the start of ‘Eat Shit and Die’ begs the question of how these guys disciplined themselves to synths so strictly on the last album. While heavier in nature, The Violent Blue’s second half plays out a series of lovely, unsettled ripples that feel like a needed, natural progression.

As Electric President balance their ferocity, they also weigh the scope and punch of their songwriting with each conservative stunner like ‘Feathers’ or the title track being measured by a more adventurous composition. ‘Nightmare No. 5 Or 6’ is constructed like a classical piece, so flooded with well-executed tempo-shifts and tasteful instruments, it’s profane to admit how catchy the whole thing is. Less cerebral but no less enthralling is finale ‘All the Distant Ships’, a nine-minute sludge-fest that occasionally peels back into moments of clarity that, nuanced with beautiful lyrics and soft beds of twinkling piano, almost made me cry this morning.

Beyond the common nautical themes shared by these songs, The Violent Blue deserves its non-B-sides status because these songs couldn’t pass for anything but Electric President’s A-game. And while I’ve enjoyed trying to pinpoint the songs birthed by Sleep Well (I have my suspicions), the awe comes from hearing a band who shook me senseless two years ago returning with equally powerful songwriting and a bolder, organic sound. What this album might accomplish for the band, in terms of exposure, is anyone’s guess but one thing’s for sure: The Violent Blue is another must-listen marker in this discography, and proof that their footing as songwriters has never been more assured.

Patients - Patients

Patients

Patients
Self-Released.

SCQ Rating: 78%

Music in the internet age carries the same criticisms implicit to the wild west, namely because everyone involved – musicians, distributors, labels, sellers, buyers and stealers – each suffer or prosper from a system in chaos. Word of mouth, once a term to reflect a slow, grassroots-style of hype, now moves like a cloud of locusts, devouring trends and bands in record time. In the same way Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa lost its aura at the helm of a thousand fridge magnets, cheap print-outs and goofy commercial parodies, albums have similarly lost their luster, reduced to an invisible file that is stolen, copied and traded among friends. Despite these criticisms that understandably argue the commodification of music, the internet has also presented artists with opportunities to create events. Few of us (locusts and listeners alike) could forget Radiohead’s grand In Rainbows strategy yet each year holds a few of these unique surprises (recall NIN’s The Slip give-away or Fog’s recent purging of five new albums online). For 2009, I can’t imagine a more inventive or rewarding event than the Patients Project curated by Electric President/Radical Face guru Ben Cooper; a trade-off between musician and fan that resulted in fans receiving an ultra-limited compilation of unheard tunes and Cooper getting to know his fanbase on a more intimate level. For those interested in details and final results (as the project is now closed), check out his website.

Although I missed out on the Patients Project’s first wave (which included one of 100 uber-limited discs packaged in homemade fashion by Cooper himself), I participated in the second wave and was awarded Patients’ eleven tracks in MP3 format. My natural instinct concerning anything free is to recall that modern fable “you get what you pay for”, yet from the opening strums of ‘Tall Tale No. 5’, any premature thoughts of throwaway tracks and subpar b-sides simply dissipated from my mind. The song acts as a bildungsroman for Cooper and his various shadows, narrating the birth and emotional development of a storyteller who, I suspect, details events both fictional and autobiographical. The distinction is inconsequential given the quality of songwriting throughout but it’s nearly impossible to ignore Cooper’s numerous guises present, moving effortlessly from the complex dance rhythms of ‘Mind Ur Manners’ or the front-porch folk of ‘Sad Business’ to the stuttering found-sound bridge of ‘Mathematics’. The freedom of such a project also allows experiments like ‘Body Song’ (composed with but one instrument – the human body) and a gentle cover of a Robin Hood tune (yah, Disney’s - no Kevin Costner meets Bryan Adams reminiscing here…). That such variety never becomes overwhelming nor steals the thunder of the songs themselves proves how seamlessly Cooper wears these guises, making it a more fluid album than it has any right to be.

Part of Patients’ allure is its constant shift between styles and identity, which should come as no surprise to those familiar with Cooper’s double-shift between Electric President and Radical Face. The other half of discovering Patients is finding those tracks that are simply too good to not belong on an official release, and thusly trying to figure out where they should settle. ‘The Coldest Hand’ has the atmosphere necessary to be a b-side of Sleep Well, while ‘The Voice of Our Age’ could belong on a more extroverted, big-screen Radical Face project. Then there’s ‘If You Come Back to Haunt Me’, an explosive finale that despite hauling many Cooper trademarks cannot fit within any of his day-jobs. Is it a clue of things to come? One can only hope…

Simply put, there is no black or white regarding music in the internet era; the state of record sales, promotional efforts and downloading are all lost in gray areas of debate. And while I’m against the downloading of music whereby the artist responsible receives no recognition or compensation, I encourage anyone interested to seek out these songs online. This Patients project seems far more of a closet-cleansing than a money-grab (after all, he did give it out for free), so I urge anyone interested to ask around. For fans of Electric President or Radical Face, this is a must-have… and for Cooper-newbies, this is as good a place to start as any.

Sleep Well - Electric President

Sleep Well

Electric President
Morr Music.

SCQ Rating: 92%

Morr Music, the independent label that grew to prominence amid electronica’s broadening from a dancefloor reaction to the soundtrack of your livingroom armchair, has pigeonholed itself into a precarious rut over the past few years. From Guther’s I Know You Know to this Spring’s Bobby and Blumm collaboration, Morr’s innovation of home-listening beat-patterns stagnated to such a degree, only the unassuming coyness of twee could properly compliment such diminishing returns. And while you have to respect the German imprint for standing by their narrow sonic margins so stringently, truth is, it’s difficult to justify buying a Morr album when you know exactly what it’ll sound like.

Electric President, besides representing Morr’s snail-quick acknowledgement of the guitar, never fit in. A duo from Florida of all places, Ben Cooper and Alex Kane recorded their self-titled debut in a tool-shed behind Cooper’s house. Bearing the electronic-rock tag that pitted them in the shadows of Postal Service, Electric President created fair buzz then dissipated into the trenches of eccentric/goofy indie-rock that plagued 2005’s college charts.

Sleep Well, their thirteen-month-in-the-making sophomore effort, is an entirely different beast; a gracefully distressed symphony of fevered intentions and darkened bedrooms that cause elation as often as shivers. As blurred as that imaginary moment where a dream becomes nightmare, many of these songs endure transformations that fail to carry any sign of closure; a strategy that abandons some of these tracks from becoming fully cohesive songs, but lends bravado to the album as a whole. Yes, you'll find several songs that are gorgeously compelling but it’s those transient tracks that embed the album with its shape-shifting heart; idea-packed movements through dark territory and harsh light for your inner narcoleptic.

What marks Sleep Well as such a devastatingly better album than its predecessor (and the duo as an entirely altered creative force) is how confidently they milk ideas from such a singular thematic focus: the nature of nightmares. As explained in Morr’s video promo for the release, Cooper discusses how he collected a scrapbook of nightmare accounts, written through the night or by morning, and eventually turned to the narratives for songwriting inspiration. Unlike that video, however, which goes to great lengths to either scare or convince us of Electric President’s newfound goth-cred, Sleep Well roundly encourages the notion that Cooper and Kane, who sounded like sarcastic arts students last time around, have truly ascended to a level of songcraft most bands die hoping for (to the point, in fact, that the video promo does more harm than good). The trancelike ‘We Will Walk Through Walls’, with its rich bass and cavernous melodies, moves hauntingly into ‘Graves and the Infinite Arm’, a creeping contrast that would be polarizing if not for the band’s seductive use of synths, which are as funereal as The Cure’s Faith era.

With any justice, this should crowd critic’s year-end lists and reinvigorate Morr Music from its comfortable coma. So fully realized and lovely, Sleep Well doesn’t seem ostracized from its label so much as evolved from Morr’s lush and pristine trademarks; no more than in closing track ‘When It’s Black’, an electronic minor-chord skeleton that grows into its piano, otherworldly chants, and erupts into a raging distorted guitar close. Neither the band nor label have ever rocked like this, and it’s a scorching end I still can’t wake up from.