There’s an old saying that the nerds in high school will someday be the bosses of the jocks and meatheads. As much as I hate to stereotype, Erlend Oye could be the poster boy for the chess club. Staring out behind glass bottle bottom glasses and playing host to the pastiest physique this side of Conan O’Brien and The Pale Force, the voice of Kings of Convenience embraces his Scandinavian genes. No, he doesn’t don a pocket protector and calculator in his back pocket, but he does bear a striking resemblance to Poindexter from “Revenge of the Nerds” fame.

Musicians aren’t nerds, though (except for Kenny G). When you can write songs and have been making music like Oye has been for the past five years, your nerdiness of before becomes charming. Speaking of charming, Oye’s new collaboration, aptly entitled The Whitest Boy Alive, is just that. It is cut from the same electro groove cloth as Oye’s solo album Unrest, circa 2003.

Where his solo album sometimes seemed too clean for its own good, however, Whitest Boy’s debut Dreams thrives in its jam session comfort. Take the first track “Burning” for instance. There are no bleeps or tricks thrown in there to enhance the song. The band is confident in its own tightness. Riding rudimentary drum beats and bass lines, the guitar carries the track through the riff to sloppy, off the cuff ranting, which is like a helping of black pepper and brown sugar thrown into the batch of meat and potatoes

That is inevitably how this album panned out, too. Smooth jams mixed with moments of bittersweet, and all the while Erlend’s voice taking the limelight. And what a voice it is. So docile it could throw a bear into hibernation months prematurely. He could read the back of a shampoo bottle and I would cough up the $0.99 to buy it off iTunes.

It’s hard to decide which Oye is best. There is the babymaking acoustic Oye of Kings of Convenience, or the Oz behind the mixing board Oye of his solo album and “DJ Kicks.” Either way, whatever he is up to, it is hard to go wrong, and Dreams seems like a jumping off point somewhere in between the two.

“The whitest boy alive” is not exactly a distinction you see the youth of the world fighting to achieve. It’s not the prom king, it’s sure as hell not the varsity quarterback with the letterman jacket and arm candy. The whitest boy alive has connotations that every caucasion seeks to avoid, that is, everyone but Erlend Oye and his band of boys. You’re not fooling anyone though, Erlend. You may be a pasty white dude from Norway, but a Poindexter, you are not.

The Whitest Boy Alive