Green but promising, Black Kids deserves time to grow
Not so long ago, those crazy Internet success stories were a thrilling peek into the grassroots potential of Web-launched music careers. No longer required to sell their souls to the corporate devil in order to reach a worldwide audience, talented young musicians post their four songs online, generate blog buzz, amass a fan base, and wait for the major-label bidding war to begin. It’s tastemaking from the bottom up, a refreshing inversion of the historical power structure.
But the phenomenon is becoming all too routine, and the pop and rock landscape is brimming with celebrated neophytes scrambling to justify the hype.
Black Kids, a Jacksonville, Fla., quintet that plays scruffy new-wave dance music, is the current darling. The band followed the modern template to the letter, careening from MySpace to Pitchfork to Coachella to Columbia Records in months. “Partie Traumatic,” Black Kids’ debut album, will be released July 22, and the band performed all of it for a packed crowd during its first visit to Boston on Monday.
Appealingly peppy, willfully unpolished, and deeply indebted to the Cure, the Jam, and the Go! Team, Black Kids isn’t quite ready for its close-up. It’s too bad, because this is a green band with promise that will probably be lost in the iPod generation’s perpetual shuffle without ever having the chance to deepen and grow. As it stands now, Black Kids’ effusive, derivative songs smack of a band enchanted (as young bands should be) with other people’s music, figuring out how to make rudimentary skills sound heroic, and a little lost in the process of transposing cliches into meaningful music.
There are only two black kids in Black Kids - singer/guitarist Reggie Youngblood and his sister, keyboardist/backup singer Ali, who formed the group with three friends from Sunday school (bassist Owen Holmes, drummer Kevin Snow, and keyboardist/singer Dawn Watley). Their best song - “I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance With You,” the album’s first single - is a clever mash of Robert Smith-style yelping and pep-squad cheers, squiggly synths, and lo-fi guitars. The rest of the tunes are cut from the same cloth: discofied pop, flush with exuberantly disaffected hooks, and delivered onstage at the Paradise with a punk’s indifference to pitch or prettiness.
Black Kids’ live performance was rougher than their bright, brittle recordings. “Hit the Heartbrakes” and “Hurricane Jane,” both available on the band’s MySpace page, were endearingly shaggy and out of tune. By contrast, the songs’ dynamics were carefully cobbled throughout. On the mindlessly sensual new-wave track “Listen To Your Body Tonight” and “Look at Me (When I Rock Wichoo),” a circa-’70s radio ringer, Black Kids showed real feel for building grooves to a galvanizing peak. Now they just need some time, a frighteningly elusive commodity, to turn 30 years of winning signifiers into a signature sound.
Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com. For more on music visit boston.com/ae/music/blog.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
Black Kids
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