»I crossed the ocean for a heart of gold.«
Music sounds different by the sea than at any other place: Burt Bacharach's »Pacific Coast Highway«, Jim O'Rourke's »Ghost Ship in a Storm«, or those »Teenage Symphonies to God« which Brian Wilson, the big baby being scared of water, composed in his Californian bedroom – having an artificial beach underneath his feet. The tracks of Electric President throw a glance at the sea as well. They drifted from Jacksonville Beach/Florida through the Atlantic Ocean up to Berlin, from Ben Cooper to Morr Music.
These ten songs interpret pop as an ocean of impressions and sensations and surf on their own and special surge. Ben Cooper, age 23, compiled his clear but complex pop-pearls along with Alex Kane, 21, to their first self-titled album. Continuously, Cooper's soft but still precise idiom drifts into our ears, as a flattering yearning. And maybe it is this voice that describes his music's agenda best: Stripped, immediate and at the same time interwoven with euphonic choirs. Some people might be reminded of Death Cab for Cutie's Benjamin Gibbard – but without the teenage angst.
Ben Cooper is a songwriter and arranger; he is a guitarist, drummer, laptop artist... The order of these occupations is up to his music and his moods. At times intimate and reduced, as in »Grand Machine No. 12«, enriched only by means of a few digital clicks and some heart-warming backing vocals. In other instances, it's hymnal and interlocking, as in the sunny opening song: »Good Morning, Hypocrite«. Maybe they are melancholic – as melancholic as splendid pop songs mostly are. And Ben Cooper has written shiny pop songs, has arranged and recorded them with Alex Kane over the course of eight months. Bedroom recordings in the best sense, however, with little in common with LoFi. The only approach they share is to keep one's musical ideas very close to the heart and give as little as possible to other's hands. It is only Morr-Music's-own Jan Kruse, who is once again responsible for the album artwork.
»Farewell« is the name of the album's last and longest track. But you'll meet again soon. On stage. On Morr Music. On the ipod of your heart.
