Electric President

Co-president Ben Cooper is the kind of restless spirit who seems to require multiple masks to express all his inner workings. Electric President are one of five projects he is involved in from his bedrooms and basements in Florida. Working with Alex Kane (the Tamborello to Ben’s, errr, Gibbard), he makes this second release for the duo a fever chart of bedtime sweats, both real and fantastical. As on their 2006 eponymous debut, the music is a seamless blend of electronic and acoustic elements, with the good sense to know when to ease off and let the song do its work. Cooper voices both the naïve dreamer and the "monsters in [his] closet” on the opening tracks of the album, but the childish viewpoint veils deeper worries of love and loss and, ah, "Robophobia.” The songs often strike a skewed fairytale tone that peripherally recall Tim Burton’s playfully morbid visions and how they manage to elicit fun while poking around the brain’s darker corners. Despite its connective arc, the album is filled with enough bells, whistles, clicks and pops to not continually push its concepts front and centre.