Pitchfork

There's an appealing modesty at work on the debut album by Electric President, a Florida duo that confidently allow their homespun electro-pop to bubble away without feeling the need to constantly doctor the ingredients. Created under bedroom-like conditions by Ben Cooper and Alex Kane, these earnest songs are largely crafted through a soft and reliable mixture of acoustic strums, clip-clop beats, and gently surging electronic tides. Cooper's chirpy, boyish vocals make comparisons to Ben Gibbard that much more mandatory, but the album quietly moves to its own private compass, drawn by a certain resigned, melancholic gravity. The biggest hitch is that Electric President seemingly achieve all of their humble goals by mid-album, and so spend almost half their time with pencils down, repeating the day's assignments silently to themselves.

"We're all just part of someone's elaborate plan/ Just pieces in some grandiose scheme," Cooper sings on "Grand Machine No. 12", succinctly articulating the album's recurrent theme of a vague alienation and eventual obsolescence. This sense of helpless entropy also informs the album's most engaging track, "Ten Thousand Lines", where Cooper serenades the decaying wires in his bedroom wall over a gentle feedback throb reminiscent of Yo La Tengo's Electr-O-Pura. Additionally, this track is expertly punctuated by overlapping vocals, deftly edited dialogues between guitar and laptop, and several melodic "Oh no's" worthy of the Rutles. Even more ambitious-- but no less effective-- is the opening "Good Morning, Hypocrite", which is virtually the only song here that Electric President sound willing to forcefully coerce into a new direction, its perky tempo abruptly accelerating until Cooper's vocal is just barely able catch onto the rear bumper.

It isn't long, however, before the album's persistent threads of indeterminate loss and decline turn inevitably to undiluted moping over failed romances. "Hum" is a purebred fire escape lament, with a heartsick Cooper calling out, "What do you think about me now?" to the disinterested rooftops. And he's still out there later on "Some Crap About the Future", wistfully watching airplanes leave the city, self-consciously admitting to ineffectual "rambling" but not able to bring himself to stop. Unfortunately, on these occasions Electric President are unable to musically assuage his sorrows, having already pushed the limits on their invention. Cuts like the miniature shoegaze of "Snow on Dead Neighborhoods" or the politely grungy "We Were Never Built To Last" veritably beg for less constraint, more sweeping grandeur, or simply heightened volume to allow a push beyond the duo's established templates. But Electric President remain steadfastly restrained throughout, right up until the willowy, climactic "Farewell" where they at last unleash a measured broadside of furious noise, willing for once to become the forceful architects of their music rather than merely its passive stewards.