#21 Album Of 2010: The Violent Blue - Electric President

The Violent Blue

Electric President
Fake Four Records.

Original SCQ Review

Remembering The Violent Blue’s roots as a humble B-sides project almost seems like mythology now. Those early considerations of throwing a group of misfit tracks from the Sleep Well sessions onto the internet, whenever lead songwriter Ben Cooper (1) had the time, (2) finished recording a few parts, (3) properly mixed it all, (4) added a couple extra songs, and, finally, (5) reclassified it as a full-length follow-up and found it a label.

The material deserved such due process and delivers after such a prolonged waiting period. Vapours of the somber synth-party that gave Sleep Well its funereal elegance remain here (‘Circles’ and the title track), yet just as many tracks adapt to more organic surroundings. The acoustic-driven sentiments of ‘Safe and Sound’ lift Electric President’s eerie palette whereas ‘All the Distant Ships’ stomps in decidedly heavier pastures, its distorted verses contrasting beautiful, brief moments of clarity.

It’s only worth remembering this record’s B-side-worthy beginnings to put in perspective why The Violent Blue doesn’t take any permanent steps forward. Half rooted in Sleep Well’s nightmare and otherwise fleshing out Cooper’s “love-letter to the sea”, The Violent Blue is a thematically torn sister-album merging the past and present. This partial limbo may not benefit the record after the distinctly progressive showings of Electric President’s previous two LPs, but that doesn’t prevent the band from sounding nearly as brilliant standing still.

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.

27. Sleep Well – Electric President (2008)

(Taken from SCQ’s Top Twenty Albums of 2008:)

With all the caution I exercised to avoid overinflating album reviews this year, I can’t help but marvel that my #1 Album of 2008, Sleep Well, is also the highest graded album of the year. A fluke, perhaps, although I recall knowing within the first few listens that Sleep Well was unlike any record I’d heard before. There were resemblances of OK Computer-era Radiohead (‘All the Bones’), the odd Beach Boys’ harmony (‘It’s An Ugly Life’), and Kranky-caliber instrumentals (‘It’s Like a Heartbeat, Only It Isn’t’), yet these twelve tracks bound together represented something far smarter and scarier than those brief sonic affiliations.

Crafted over thirteen months in Cooper’s backyard shed (unbelievably), Sleep Well is a perfect album, comprised of multi-tempered pop-odysseys and unpredictable chills that are too catchy and symphonic to ignore. Their synths flourish and dissipate like morning fog, Ben Cooper’s voice flexes between gruff, whispered or angelic as if possessed by several nocturnal mouths; Sleep Well documents a young band surpassing their own intentions, crafting a nighttime record that makes every daylight hour seem somehow wasteful. Beyond a doubt the year’s most underrated recording.

Radical Face / Electric President (SCQ's Year-End Questionnaire Part I)

Ben Cooper, the mastermind of Electric President and Radical Face, may have spent the majority of 2009 recording (at least five records, by my count… um, maybe six) but he still managed to turn heads with Patients; a fan-oriented project that saw Ben trading super-limited, self-made copies of his b-sides collection for weird, listener-prepared snail-mail packages. Never mind that Patients was pretty awesome, Cooper belongs here as an irrefutable SCQ alumni, what with Sleep Well being SCQ’s #1 record of 2008.

SCQ: What have been some of your favourite records of 2009? Gush away!

I've been recording pretty much non-stop this year. And whenever I'm recording a lot, I don't tend to hunt down new music. The bulk of what I listen to is film scores and composers. So most of this will be instrumental, and none of it new. That being said …

The thing I've listened to the most this year is, oddly enough, the score for “The Land Before Time” by James Horner. This wasn't some nostalgia kick. It started that way, after having a conversation about how kid's movies aren't sad or scary anymore (generalization), and that kids should watch more Don Bluth movies. This got me itching to watch the Land Before Time again, so I did. And I never realized before how much of the movie's mood came from the score. I bought a copy of the soundtrack, and I love it. I probably can't entirely separate the nostalgia, but I admire it completely as music. Some of it is so pretty it's almost hard to listen to, and I love that feeling. It also prompted me to find the American Tale score, which is also great.

Beyond that, I've been listening to the kind of records I rediscover every couple of years. One was the Rachel's catalog. I come back to their music regularly. This time it was mostly the “Music For Egon Schielle” set.

The other big one was Tom Waits, predominantly “Rain Dogs” and “Mule Variations”. But I know exactly why I've been putting those on. I've been writing a lot of lyrics lately, and listening to him always makes me strive to be a better lyricist. Lines like “She said she'd stick around until the bandages came off” push me to say more with the space I've got in a song.

SCQ: Be it from the radio, lost on Myspace or from your roster, what song(s) could you not stop spinning?

For single songs, these all got a lot of play …

Cat Stevens – 'Trouble'
Modeselektor – 'Skip Divided' Remix
Pink Floyd – 'Fearless'
Saint Seans – 'Aquarium', and 'The Swan'.
Slowdive – 'Catch the Breeze'
Beethoven – 'Symphony no. 7, 2nd movement'.
Son Lux – 'Throw'
Joanna Newsom – 'Sawdust and Diamonds'
Alexandre Desplat – 'Prologue' (from the soundtrack to Birth)

SCQ: Seldom celebrated but crucial to The Album’s identity is cover-art. Can you offer any shortlist of personal favourites from the past year?

I wish I could, but I've barely seen any that were released this year. Once I take a break from recording I will dig back into some new stuff, but for now I have nothing.

But I will say, Rachel's always have really great packaging.

SCQ: When you look back on what transpired this year, what will stand out as your most memorable moment(s) of 2009?

Not really a single event, but I had a really great Summer. Nothing specific happened, but I'm normally not a Summer person. It's my least favorite time of year. I usually just see it as 4 months of sweating all the damn time, feeling lazy, and waiting for Fall to show up. But this year I decided to enjoy it as best I could. No sense making an enemy out of something if you don't have to, eh? So I started walking to the ocean four or five afternoons a week, and just swimming or walking up and down the shore and writing in my notebook. And I came to love it. One of my nicest moments this year was sitting in the sand, reading a Peter Beagle short story and eating an apple. It was pretty perfect.

SCQ: Most of us probably haven’t thought as far as New Years Eve plans but still, looking forward, what do you have on the horizon for 2010?

I'll still be recording. But if all goes as planned, I will be releasing a lot of records next year (Electric President, Clone, and the Radical Face records). That wasn't initially the intention, to have them all so close together, but it's all kinda falling into place that way. I have plans to do some DIY touring as well, to try doing it in a way I'd genuinely enjoy. Still kinda working all this out, though. For all I know, none of this will happen and I'll be spending next year wondering what I've done with my life.

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.