electric president - "snow on dead neighborhoods" (from the electric president lp, available for purchase here.)

electric president are going to be big in 2006. and b/c they're going to be big in 2006, they're going to be compared to other bands who were big in previous years, viz. the postal service. b/c he leads w/ his adenoids, singer ben cooper will be compared to ben gibbard; b/c they employ electronics, they'll be lucky to get away just being compared to postal service--hopefully no one mentions that fucking oberst album.

ben cooper, though, sounds like a lot of people aside from gibbard, a veritable who's who of indie rock : sam beam, wayne coyne, isaac brock, &c; in other words, he has one of those voices. as for the music, it's a specious claim to compare the two bands; it's like saying, well, the dave clark five played guitar-bass-drums, and so did the birthday party, and therefore they = same. the postal service dynamic pitches gibbard against the machines (and the machines win more often than not, which is why i like the service and not the cab). electric president, the name a bit of a giveaway, embrace their robot parts and, like the great synthetic tamers of the past, learn to humanize them. there's nothing "natural" sounding about "snow"; the music swoops in and out like a gale, but cooper sounds unaffected. insetad, music and vocal form a gestalt, w/ no telling where man ends and machine begins. the total effect is of peering down a city sidestreet covered in snow, the streetlights reflecting gold off of it, the chill balanced w/ warmth--a fine description of the band itself.