LP

What Discovery have made is an album that is pop music of the highest caliber – bright and electronic and romantic, danceable, full of effects and production tricks, all these adorable lyrics like “I did your laundry while you slept.” I’ve asked this question before and I’ll ask it again: What’s wrong with that?

If nothing else, LP should be admired for the way it eschews most modern indie (and especially side projects)’s penchant for flitting around music’s margins – touching on greatness, but never quite going for it – and instead aims straight for the jugular, every chance it gets.

Unique and easily-liked, their debut borrows tricks from the pop charts to make songs with both hook and soul. Although bordering on bubblegum, LP is sunny enough for January, as well as July.

Overall, the feeling you get from the record is that of a couple of guys having an incredibly fun time creating music that has absolutely no socially redeeming values at all.

A clean, expertly crafted, saccharin pop record that provides that rare blend of Top 40 appeal and indie aesthetic. LP glows like midnight under Tokyo lights.

The combination of Miles’ bright auto-tune vocals and Batmanglij’s impressive work on the synthesizer prove to be a successful pairing

A Vampire Weekend hip-hop side project? Sounds crazy, but it's one beautiful fusion.

Vampire Weekend keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij and Ra Ra Riot singer Wes Miles put their own spin on modern R&B.

Goofy lyrics and too-frequent Auto-Tuning pushes this close to winking douchebaggery, but not too close.

These guys build R&B; jams with hand claps, 808 whomps and T-Pain-style vocals like hyperactive kids with a Lego set, piling up fragments into tracks that often don't end so much as just stop.

The debut full-length from Discovery, the long-gestating hipster R&B project from Rostam Batmanglij (Vampire Weekend) and Wes Miles (Ra Ra Riot), is a little boring.

While LP should ideally be listened to in the presence of at least one of its makers so you can shriek ”what were you THINKING!?” at them over and over, it’s not a record you can quite bring yourself to actively despise: there’s simply not enough there.

It’s a stylistically simple affair, with the innocent-sounding, frequently cut-up vocals backed up by spacey, bubbly samples floating about over syncopated programmed beats, chunky keyboard chords and not a lot else.