“Strike while the iron is hot” is still a sound philosophy in the music business, but lately the trend has been to strike with a side project — we can probably thank The White Stripes’ Jack White for that. Discovery is made up of Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglij and Ra Ra Riot’s Wes Miles, and is likely to earn them comparisons to another famous electronic-pop side project, Ben Gibbard’s The Postal Service, but the similarities are only superficial. Where The Postal Service was made to sound like simple, rickety electro-pop, Discovery is much more dense and sophisticated. The music on LP comes in waves, the beats are fractured and temperamental and Miles’s vocals float like he’s bobbing up and down in an ocean of noise.
LP is a mixed bag, with some near-perfect songs and others that feel like abandoned false starts. The former category includes the previously leaked “Orange Shirt” and the skittering “Osaka Loop Line.” A twisted, vocoder-induced cover of Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” is a particular highlight. Taking away from those, though, are “So Insane” and “Slang Tang,” which are both busy to the point of being disorienting. Discovery carries the spirit of both members’ original bands, but LP feels a lot longer than its 10 tracks.
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