Electric President are Ben Cooper and Alex Kane, – two young musicians in their early twenties from Jacksonville, Florida. Cooper is clearly the main composer here, and he does quite a lot on his own. He sings, play guitars, play drums, arrange and compose the songs + works on the electronic bits on his laptop. This is Electric President’s debut album, released on the german quality label Morr Music, and as mostly everything else on Morr, – this album is also based on electronic instruments, – but not only. Accoustic and electric guitars, live drums, strings and vocals are very present here, on all songs.

“S/T” is a very warm album that is easy to fall in love with. It offers something that goes straight into the ears, something that goes straight into the heart and something that needs some interpretation by the brain. Often it offers all these things in the same song, and some of it becomes visible after some listens.
“Clear but complex” is a statement that fits this album perfectly: The music is very accessible and melodic, often with clear, – almost childlike and naive melodies. But there is an ocean of complex musical elements beneath. It is like a good book, – you can understand it on different levels and it gives you a different experience depending on how you read it / listen to it. I am often stunned by the creative cleverness of these arrangements, and the sense these composers must have had for all the small details that makes this music so interesting to listen to.

There are something timeless over the songs these guys have made. I hear influences from several musical genres in here, – some blues, some folk, some rock, a lot of pop, even some country and of course electronica… I also hear a lot of Neil Young. It might be Cooper’s voice, but I also think there are some Young’ish elements in their songwriting. When I listen to this music, I get the impression that I’m listening outside of the genre-fences, – this is something of everything. Refreshing to hear electronic based music so free-minded as this.
More modern comparisons may be The Postal Service, Styrofoam, Morr’s own The GoFind and Clue to Kalo, – and especially on the vocal and lyrical side Ben Cooper has something in common with another Ben. I guess you know who.

I have to comment on the background vocals on some of the songs. I rarely hear such clever and interesting vocal arrangements on pop albums, – this is amazing. The background voice is used beautifully as an instrument, and layers of words/da-da-da’s and tones float perfectly around underneath the main vocal track. Often I find myself listening with more interest to what’s happening behind the main vocals than to the vocals themselves.

Recommended!

Picture above: Electric President

(You can listen to Electric President on Morr Music’s website)

Ian Love was once a member of well known bands like Rival Schools and Cardia, but on his new project he is all by himself and does almost everything on his own. Love’s soloalbum will be out next year, and this time he enters the singer songwriter stage with his acoustic driven songs. I’ve heard two of the new songs, and I like them a lot! Here they are for you too:
Ian Love – the only night
Ian Love – butterfly

SIN is a norwegian electronic-based duo, but not electronic as in house or techno or experimental electronica. When I first heard SIN, I thought “these guys must have listened a lot to the danish band Mew!”. Sin is Marius Drogs�s Hagen and Tord �verland Knudsen, two young men who works with this as a sideproject. They are also in other norwegian bands like The Wombats, Jaqueline and Auden Prim. SIN’s music is very good for the ear, – very melodic and pop-flavoured, but the structures and the way the music is made is not what you normally hear. You’ll have to listen for yourself. Good music! The duo work together in the “postal service-way” through the internet, – one of them lives in Liverpool and the other in Oslo. At the moment, they are working on their debut album, which hopefully will finish by the summer, and they are also in dialogue with Maximilian Hecker, who will do vocals on a couple of songs.

Sin – lost in a span
Sin – lepidoptera
Sin – horn parade

2005 has been a busy year for these australians, the morning after girls. So far this year, they have signed a deal with rainbow quartz, signed another deal with a London label, released their debut album, toured USA, Canada, England and Japan, played at SXSW and New York’s CMJ festival and much much more. From listening to their album, I guess we can expect that they will experience quite a lot in the future too, because this is good music.

The album is in fact a compilation of two of their eps, and that is why the album is called “prelude eps 1+2″. Both of these two EPs are great, but do they work as an album? We’ll tell you in the end…
Those of you who heard the quite noisy single “hi skies” and thought that this was too noisy for you, – you should have another listen! The single is not representative for the music on this album, or at least we can say that the album is much more than that.

The Morning after Girls (TMAG) are gentle thiefs and borrow a lot from artists from the past. You can hear some of their influences clearly on the album. Especially The Jesus and Mary Chain, Spiritualized/Spacemen 3, Ride, Velvet Underground, Stone Roses, Black Rebel Motorcycle club, Nirvana and My Bloody Valentine are artists that I expect to be in the TMAG songwriter’s record collection. If you manage to have one eye to the past and one eye to the future, it is not a bad idea to make use for musical elements that have worked well for other artists earlier. TMAG manages this to some extent, but the influences are in my opinion too many and too diverse. I hear so many hints of other artists, that I start looking for them in the tracks, and that is not the way I want to be focused when I listen to music.

The album opens in atmospheric chaos, with the psychedelic instrumental opening “introduction”, – a track that as well could have been on an early album by Spiritualized. The feeling of the first track follows us into the album, -especially on “fall before waking”, – kind of an “introduction 2″, and on the opening of the extremely beautiful “chasing us under”. This song is one of my favourites on the album and I just love the way the strings, the dreamy, layered vocals and the rhythm-guitar makes this track flow slowly right into my heart. I personally think the instrumental psychedelic parts are a minus for this album. These musicians are such great songsmiths that they should focus on that. All those introductions are just distractions to me, and especially on a perfect track like “chasing us under”, the starting noise just doesn’t fit for me. I also like “Lazy Greys” a lot. On this track, the band seem to have travelled back to Manchester in the 90s with their time-machine, and stopped for a short visit at The Stone Roses’s rehearsal room. I love the Roses from that era, and I love this song.
Another favourite is the infectious and massive “Always mine”, where both the guitars and the vocals remind me of RIDE. Mark Gardener from these legendary shoegazers are also present on this album with vocals on “fall before waking”. On “hidden spaces” the band sounds almost like a 60s popband or maybe like Chris Isaak, with surf guitars and harmonic vocals.

Back to my starting question: Do these two ep’s work good together as an album? The answer: Yes, they do to some extent. However, I think the concistency of “prelude eps 1+2″ would have been much better if some songs had been rearranged and maybe some songs should have been replaced with new ones to make the album-feeling better. I think the album could have been tighter if it had been made originally as an album, and not as two ep’s. A great album is, by my definition, an album where the whole package works, – from the placement of the songs, the compositions, the cover and especially how the songs work together. This album has most of it. Most of the songs are good, the cover is not great, but it works for the music, but the songs does not work as much together as a whole as I would like them to.

The morning after girls have a great … or should I say GREAT potential, but the next time they make an album, I would love them to tie the strings harder and be more to the point. The next producer will be an important person for the bands further developement. And if I wasn’t clear enough…please do not make any more of those interludes and ruin perfect songs with psychedelic intros and outros. Please…