The pair known as Sylvan Esso might exhibit a certain kind of sensual cool with their minimalist, danceable brand of electro. But on the snaky “Coffee,” vocalist Amelia Meath breaks into a somewhat unexpected callback — “My baby does the hanky panky,” she sings over her bandmate Nick Sanborn’s intricate mélange of chicken-shakes and syncopated xylophones.  The reference is to the 1966 No. 1 single “Hanky Panky” by Tommy James and the Shondells — another time in pop music entirely. But to hear Meath tell it, the unison of “American Bandstand”-era rave-ups and present-day post-R&B is perfectly natural.  “I really like referencing songs within songs, because it’s like having a footnote — you can delicately suggest so much other meaning by just using a line of a song that people associate with something else,” says Meath via phone from Minneapolis. “‘Hanky Panky’ was such a sexy song when it first came out, and it actually still is, if you forget about how up-front sexuality is expressed right now. If you listen to it, it’s pretty dope. And it can be interpreted like ‘Me and my baby are going to [hook up],’ or ‘My baby is cheating on me.’ ”  The implied conflict in that line is essential to the appeal of Sylvan Esso and its self-titled debut LP, recently issued on the Partisan label. The duo’s music is simultaneously light as air and rooted in deliberate rhythms, with Sanborn’s beats and Meath’s multitracked vocals working together to create swirling, yet rhythm-oriented synthpop songs that lyrically split the difference between matter-of-fact confessional and airy poetry. The arrangements are spare enough — snapped fingers here, a descending synth line there — that Meath’s vocals act as a percussive element at times, defining the beats while also darting between Sanborn’s musical elements.  “I don’t play an instrument, so when I’m writing a song — the lyrics and everything — I’m singing into the air,” says Meath. “So sometimes the percussiveness is a byproduct of imagining other instruments, and making those sounds with my voice. I listen to really percussive music as well, hip-hop and all those sorts of things, so I feel quite comfortable, and I find it’s interesting when the voice does have percussive elements.”  Meath and Sanborn met when the two were working on other musical projects: Meath was in the Bennington, Vt.-based goth-folk outfit Mountain Man, while Sanborn performed with the psych act Megafaun. The two crossed paths in Milwaukee, where Meath asked Sanborn to remix the Mountain Man track “Play It Right”; the vocals meshed so well with Sanborn’s precisely realized beats that the intense, looping result became the first Sylvan Esso collaboration. On the track, ghostly vocals are anchored by Sanborn’s backing track, and feel as if they’re being driven further into the ground with each synth-burp-accented chorus.  Initially, Sylvan Esso was a virtual project, owing to the geographical distance between the two. “E-mail was really funny, because we would each have different ideas of how the other would react to what we did, and the other person would interpret it really differently,” recalls Meath. “For example, Nick totally changed the time signature of [opening track] ‘Hey Mami,’ and it was so awesome — but I was confused about how to communicate to him that what I had intended was different. And then I was like, ‘Oh, wait! This rules. We should keep it.’ ”  The duo’s collaborative style shifts with each song, although it’s a testament to their partnership that Sylvan Esso hangs together so well. “Sometimes Nick has a full instrumental and I write over top of that, and sometimes I have a full song and he writes over it,” says Meath. “Sometimes we’re just, you know, hanging out and one of us starts singing and the other’s like, ‘Ooh, that’s it!’ and we’ll sing it into our phone and go back to talking.”  Meath and Sanborn are now based in Durham, N.C., where Meath moved after touring with Feist at the end of 2011. “Around the time I was thinking, maybe I should move, Nick and I started working on the Sylvan Esso stuff,” says Meath. “I went and spent a weekend and was like, ‘Oh, everyone here is amazing. I should just hang out here.’ It took about two weeks from the time I visited Durham to be like, ‘I’m moving here,’ and I just packed everything up.”  Sylvan Esso appeals in large part because of its sophisticated sparseness, which could be tricky to export to the live setting (the pair play a sold-out show at the Sinclair Sept. 10). But the band has been road-tested since the May release of its first album, touring with the powerhouse live act tUnE-yArDs, and it knows to only mess with its setup as audiences demand.  “We have a light show, and the performance is definitely different because we’re there in front of people,” notes Meath. “They affect how you reinterpret the song, of course. But there’s not a flute player or anything.”
Sylvan Esso, the duo of vocalist Amelia Meath and instrumentalist Nick Sanborn, brings its sultry brand of minimalist electro-pop to Cambridge for a Sinclair show.