Mongo Nation

Over-hyped and under-delivered

By Jeremy Azevedo

Look, I’m just as guilty as anyone when it comes to accepting responsibility for encouraging the whole 80s synth revival thing. I’ve been telling anyone who will listen to check out local LA keytar heroes like Totally Radd!!, Rocket, Bedtime For Toys, This Blush, etc. for months, years even.

I haven’t been able to get enough of the stuff. You can dance to it, it always sounds epic due to the whole nostalgia thing, and it beats the hell out of nu-metal, that’s for goddamn sure. But a line has to be drawn, a line that differentiates real musicians ironically employing old pop conventions in fun new ways from the shameless cash-ins that clearly don’t know the difference between synth pop and disco. I draw that line right here, with the Black Kids debut album “Partie Traumatic”.

Detective: Can you please point out the ones that sucked, miss?
Victim: Yes officer, yes I can… It was… (sobs)… it was all of them!

Most people will compare the Black Kids to The Cure, maybe because of lead singer Reggie Youngblood’s over-dramatic, fake English accent. Comparisons to the B-52s are probably also in order due to the intolerable backup vocals of the two female keyboard players. Mostly what this is though is a bunch of misfit hipsters playing bad disco music for other dipshit hipsters to do coke to because they aren’t old enough to know that disco music was a crime against all that is holy.

The best thing I can say for the Black Kids is that they sound like the poor man’s Franz Ferdinand (which sounds like the poor man’s Hot Hot Heat, which sounds like the poor man’s Buzzcocks, and so on and so forth). Also, they are pretty tolerable if you hear them in some shitty hipster bar after they’ve run out of MGMT, Vampire Weekend and Ting Ting songs to play, and you’re already so wasted on bottom shelf vodka that you can’t make out the half-retarded lyrics tumbling out of the speakers.

There really isn’t anything that the Black Kids are doing that someone else isn’t already doing better, and I guarantee you that you would be embarrassed to bump this in your car with the windows down when you hear how cheese-dick most of the songs actually are. I suggest you listen to reason on this one, say no to disco, and pick up the new Alkaline Trio or something worth a damn instead.

Score: 6 out of 10
+2 of you love to do a whole bunch of (someone else’s) blow, drink Sparks, wear ass-tight neon green girl jeans with red suspenders and dance to Hot Chip, Justice and Crystal Castles wherever there’s an open vodka bar from 10pm-11pm
-2 if you’re not a douchebag hipster