Music review

Black Kids: Partie Traumatic (Universal Music)

FORMED in early 2006, Florida five-piece Black Kids is an indie rock band fronted by singer-songwriter Reggie Youngblood (vocals and guitar), Owen Holmes (bass guitar), Kevin Snow (drums), Dawn Watley (keyboards and backing vocals), and Reggie’s twin sister Ali (keyboards and backing vocals).

The band members are not entirely American-African. Nor are they literally kids anymore.

With coed harmonies and snatches of R&B, Black Kids has a more classic pop sound than your typical indie-rock band. It created a huge buzz on the Internet by posting its music on its MySpace page. And soon, everyone wanted a piece of the band.

Black Kids toured Britain early this year and while there, the band recorded its debut album, Partie Traumatic, with producer Bernard Butler, former guitarist of Suede.

Mixing racy lyrics with bouncy beats and gender blurring points of view, Black Kids borrows from seemingly every genre intended to get the soundtrack for a good time, from disco to new wave to electropop.

The record starts positively enough with the catchy chorus of Hit The Heartbreaks, with Youngblood’s vocals eerily similar to Robert Smith of The Cure.

Next comes the title song, Partie Traumatic, complete with spooky electronic tone mixed with a party hook – and yet it’s one of the album’s better songs.

Easily one of the most fun tracks on the album, I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance has an infectious quality that rattles around your head for hours after, as does most of this solid debut album. Cue the memories of a bad 80s film depicting the dance floor as a lovers’ battleground. “He’s got two left feet and he bites my moves”. Our hero doesn’t get the girl, but his consolation is style.

Lyrically, Reggie often refers to himself in song as a girl, writing terse, bittersweet lyrics that recall Morrissey and the Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt.

Some couplets stands out as carefully crafted pop poetry, including “This jungle is massive / So please don’t be so passive / Be aggressive / Impress us / And they will get the message”, from Partie Traumatic.

In Nov 14 last year, Rolling Stone magazine called them one of 10 Artists to Watch in 2008. The band was also included in the BBC Sound of 2008 poll.

Add to that the fact that only two members are black, the girls sport ’dos that rival the B-52’s and their music sounds like a record cut in 1983, there’s enough fun 80s style synth-pop and ragged guitar, modernised with à la mode chant-style vocals plus a pinch of 60s girlband harmonies, to make this record perfectly acceptable pre-night-on-the-town listening. Partie Traumatic is this year’s best dance/pop album.

One of the best 80’s British New Wave albums not to come out of England... or the 80s.