Go Find

With the success of Postal Service’s unique electro indie pop mixture last year — now ranked as Sub Pop’s second best-selling record, still some distance behind Nirvana’s Bleach — it was only a matter of time before amateurish cloning would start hitting the radar. Not that Morr Music is any stranger to the genre, of course, having offered us Notwist’s Neon Golden just a few years back. The Go Find, a collaboration between singer/songwriter Dieter Sermeus and producer Styrofoam — whose records recall Dntel’s work, making him the ideal candidate for the position — take the same "heart-on-sleeve songwriting with thick electronic garnishes” formula that had worked so well for Tamborello and Gibbard, but then drain it of the latter’s abundance of saccharin dream-pop hooks. As a result, Miami is a severely hit and miss debut, lacking both the vocal warmth that Notwist and Postal Service rely upon, and, outside of a short progression here and there, any memorable or standout tracks. To be fair, Styrofoam, otherwise known as Arne Van Petegem, does a respectable job behind the boards, though there’s only so much you can do with underdeveloped songwriting, leaving Sermeus to blame for the record’s rather significant shortcomings.