[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z8z4sZjuy0&hl=en_US&fs=1&]
Remember Discovery? The nobody-asked-for-this combination of the keyboardist from Vampire Weekend and the lead singer of Ra Ra Riot joined together to release one album which boasted one great song, a bunch of goofy electro-tinged stabs at R&B and one truly horrid cover of the Jackson Five’s “I Want You Back.” The band’s biggest faltering point, beside being sub-Postal Service junk, was nothing sounded particularly sincere – just two indie dudes tackling pop R&B with a wink and Autotune. Miu Sakamoto’s “Phantom Girls First Love” sounds a lot like Discovery, all keyboard blurts over a minimal pop beat. But instead of slathering her voice in software to try and make this “funny,” she lets her pipes go off all earnest like. In the preview above, she’s made an irony-free piece of catchy electro-pop bleeding sincerity. It’s honestly everything I wish the Discovery project could have been: hyper-electronic pop music that just sounds flippin’ great.
Visit Sakamoto’s MySpace for more music, or just to see the weird cat creature Neaux accurately pegs as looking like the Neverending Story dragon.