It takes the world to tango

You've got male-male, cinematic musical duos Electric President and Terrestrial Tones — and a pair of Metal Hearts

By Ari Messer

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Anyone will tell you that music is about what you hear, and in certain noise-crazed circles, what you can learn to hear. In the face of this aural obsession, a troop of young, tech-savvy musical duos — the 21st century's get-out-of-the-house-and-get-out-of-your-head answer to bedroom recording — are crafting tunes based on intimate vision. They're still in the bedroom, but the windows are wide open. Flashing behind their eyes are landscapes, city lights, and e-mail, spontaneous and inviting.

Coyly titled Socialize, Metal Hearts' debut on Suicide Squeeze is a spacious, bass-driven by-product of the tension between 18-year-old Anar Badalov and 19-year-old Flora Wolpert-Checknoff's turning to friendship (they met through a "sexy Greek friend" whom they both had dated). The overall sound is much more controlled than their youthfulness and apparent abandon would have you believe. "This album sucks, but our next one's gonna rule!" Badalov remarked on its release.

Brokeback lost the big one, so to speak, but Ang Lee did win Best Director, proof that we crave panoramic sensitivity. We need help to see our landscapes clearly and to recognize our emotions, slinking like pythons somewhere in their depths. Maybe that serpent is really a Modest Mouse, tired of strained modesty. The sparse opening title track finds Badalov and Wolpert-Checknoff joining voices as if writing notes back and forth, sick of pretentious parties. In their first year of college life, they wrote songs via e-mail before moving to Baltimore to devote themselves to the band. In menacing "Foothills" and noirish "Gentlemen's Spell," they return to a more honest darkness than the angsty thump of "Socialize."

Growing in texture but losing its own irony, Socialize reaches an indie-cinematic peak of self-deprecation. Many breaks are immature, falling back on the same digitized pulse, yet they nonetheless move across the spectrum refracted by American youth's metal hearts: Raw drum machine beats work hauntingly well with Sufjan-esque piano clusters on "Sunray," and "Airplanes Flying" showcases vocals akin to the Castanets' dusty balladry, providing a unique lift and almost leaving me wanting more. Almost.

Boy-boy duo Electric President's self-titled debut on Morr Music is similarly at home while surging around the world. Ben Cooper, 23, on the phone from his hometown and home base, Jacksonville, Fla., recalls signing to Morr, still feeling shocked and awed. "I got, from my perspective, a random e-mail, 'Hi ... wanna put out a record?' I had to trace it back.... It was none of my doing," he says. He did production for Astronautalis, who gave a copy of Cooper's music to Styrofoam, who liked it and contacted the label.

Before Electric President's CD-R was flying around the world, Cooper wandered Jacksonville with Alex Kane, 21, "making noise with everything — pulling on tape, dropping bags, punching a wall," and recording the results. Shadowing Cooper's heroes the Books, they cut up these live samples and fashioned remarkably unique and aquatic beats. In Kane's bedroom and Cooper's toolshed-studio, they added lush layers of instrumentation and distinctive vocals that flow celestially between innocence and heartbreak.

Benjamin Gibbard is an obvious comparison, yet it was still a surprise when he listed Electric President in his online "top five" on Death Cab for Cutie's Web site. It may sound like the Postal Service, but it looks different. Cooper sings "I've lost my taste for modern things" over delightfully crumpling rhythmic blips. Every time the duo mentions or simulates lights flickering in lifeless buildings and homes, they paint a colorful world where growing up means becoming electric in varied senses — electric, as in the precise, digitized vision of electropop, and electric, as in fluid and innately psychedelic. Cooper has been making a living selling his paintings (check out www.radicalface.com), and his life-giving touch is evident throughout.

Then there are Terrestrial Tones, whose Dead Drunk (Paw Tracks) resembles an early morning trip to the fortune-teller. The result of Black Dice member Eric Copeland and Animal Collectivist Dave Portner's Parisian summer, Dead Drunk counters the urge to become anything specific: The duo's precise vision opens up their sounds indefinitely by making everything important, from rare vinyl to the flea market itself.

Electric President's press release claims that you will meet them "on the iPod of your heart." I don't know what to think about that, but all of these records do climb with us, up to the terribly ecstatic moments when we look down at our lives and find nothing familiar, just a gorgeous, echoing canyon. They inevitably bring me back to the stark northern scenes of 101 Reykjavik; across the gaping, tripped-out canyon in Garden State; and finally to the drifting, icelike death sequence in Last Days. They remind me of how it feels to die on American soil. *