Electric Guest: "Awake"

For all the hoopla surrounding the Arcade Fire’s Album of the Year triumph at this year’s Grammys—a supposed coup for indie, for good music, for Canada—perhaps the real victory for the underground came far earlier in the night when Danger Mouse was named Producer of the Year. This, of course, probably does more harm than good: it inherently commercializes Danger Mouse’s name, it compromises his anonymity—an especially rewarding trait, him being one of the few urban-leaning producers who doesn’t blurt his name over tracks the way Spike Lee announces his joints—and it threatens to standardize his charmingly meandering sounds. With the presence of mainstream recognition lingering in a newly-built trophy room—conscious or not—Danger Mouse now faces a dauntingly logical conundrum wherein a producer realizes his ability to achieve steady chart success not by mad science (“Crazy”) but by shirking risk, calculating reward, and otherwise denying all the energy that made him such an industry oddity in the first place.

“Awake,” the choice single from upcoming SoCal scenesters Electric Guest, whom Danger Mouse purportedly handpicked as a pet project, is a sonic translation of exactly that. The band itself—whose singer Asa Taccone wrote the track for SNL’s “Dick in the Box,” an inevitable factoid from the first paragraph of future profiles if Electric Guest blows up—is intriguingly eager (though somewhat derivative) when it comes to hipster credibility. It borrows for its visual aesthetic the scribbled-in-the-margins-during-math-class artwork of every other indie band cuter than they are good. Taccone even has a fuck-yeah tumblr. But these guys also have performance chops that they’ve proven as they’ve marauded through LA’s club circuit while gaining college radio momentum and industry connections.

But the song is like Phil Spector finding three pretty girls who can harmonize and drowning them in studio sound: it’s an egotistical show, one that emphasizes its producer’s trademark more than any unique group personality. The groove of the track, as religiously catchy as it is, surrounds a melodic though methodological bass figure with staccato guitar stabs seemingly rendered in infinite space—almost the exact style of Danger Mouse’s work with Beck. The percussion is so fragile as to be pocket-sized, neutered of any role but timekeeping and lacking the uninhibited spunk (think “Young Folks”) that a band this young and eager should possess. Taccone’s vocal, meanwhile, sidesteps any semblance of charisma in the pursuit of cool, and the chorus harmonies—while gloriously celestial—arrive exactly when expected and depart on predictable cue. And just when the whole thing surges (even swaggers a bit) during its mid-song second chorus, it deflates into a leftfield instrumental conclusion that parrots much of the Broken Bells record.

All that said, “Awake” might actually work, if only because it’s worked before. It’s a decent single as is—and one I’d love to see live to hear Electric Guest unharnessed—that somehow loses its soul in studio form. There’s a void in the world of accessible indie pop, vacant because MGMT now writes twelve-minute songs about Siberia and Phoenix is dating models, and I wonder if Electric Guest might be able to fill it. “Awake” isn’t big enough to do so; it’s the impassive hum of a band already in the midst of automation. It just sounds like these guys are half-asleep.