Another debut album, this time from the Glasgow band Wake the President. I vaguely remember seeing this band live over a year ago and wondering how they got to play in a venue selling alcohol when the twins Erik and Bjorn Sandberg looked so young. In fact, I felt like sending then down the corner shop to get a couple of bottles of fizzy pop after their set ended. Fizzy pop? Perhaps I can use that phrase as a segue into the actual review…
So, are Wake the President purveyors of fizzy pop? Not really, as they have set themselves firmly into the indie pop mould with liberal doses of edgy, jangly guitar dragging each song along. That probably makes the album sound worse than it actually is. The songs are jaunty enough with "Miss Tierney" standing out as an obvious single but there is a sense of safety about it all. Bjorn Sandberg's guitar work is a case in point. On a couple of tracks, he really pulls some fresh ideas out of the bag but for the rest, he sticks to tried and true riffs that could have come from a standard session musician. Likewise the lyrics that, despite their intelligence, seem to lack poetry or indeed any sort of passion.
As to where this band should be placed in the Scottish music scene, they would have to be placed between The Just Joans and The Felt Tips. Clearly a lot less twee than the former band and lot less deviant than the blackly humorous Felt Tips, Wake the President have produced a well crafted if unadventurous album here. It's probably a little too clever for mass appeal as well (that's probably a side effect of reading too many books) but it should nonetheless keep fans of indie pop happy.