Music Review: Black Kids - Partie Traumatic

There comes a moment in every good drunken binge when one stands upon the thin line between brilliance and embarrassment.

Lay off on the booze and ride the buzz, and you could have an epic night that will live forever in the legend of your mid-20s. Have just one more drink and you're liable to devolve into a stumbling, slurring mess, yelling loudly about the DJ's shitty taste in music and groping some poor wallflower who just came out because it was her roommate's birthday, and she has a boyfriend serving in Iraq, and he's gonna kick your ass when he gets home.

The songs on Black Kids' Partie Traumatic take place inside that brief window--those minutes, or hours, in each evening when you are both impervious to pain and more vulnerable than you could ever have imagined yourself to be. You are equally capable of breaking hearts and having your heart broken, sometimes within the same stray glance. You are all-powerful and powerless.

In other words, you're the driving chords, withering lyrics, and hook-laden chorus of a great pop song.

There are at least two great pop songs on Partie Traumatic, several really good ones, and only a few clunkers. The whole record is lathered in hand-claps, sweeping synths, and exquisite guitar licks. If you can imagine Robert Smith of the Cure writing songs to be performed by Slippery When Wet era Bon Jovi, you've got a good idea. It's a collection of decadent, winning songs that make you want to chug three PBRs and spin around a dirty club floor with your new best friends until closing time.

This is one of those debut albums where there's a sense of magical inevitability about it; it's as though the band and its music already existed on some higher plane, and fate finally conspired to bring these people together to record these songs. How else do you explain away the fact that the band's best song, "I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You," was written at their first rehearsal? Most bands gig and play and write for years to be able to craft a pop song that good; for Black Kids, their first songwriting at-bat was a grand slam.

That's their first great pop song and it's a doozy. "I'm Not Gonna Teach..." kicks in with this crunchy guitar riff, head-slapping in its simplicity; this is your basic 1-4-5 chord progression with a minor thrown in for angst. Then the synth enters, with a taunt, a true "nyah, nyah nyah nyah-ha" line, followed by the propulsive drums.

Article Author: Matt Springer

Matt Springer should probably trim his toenails more often. Instead, he spends far too much time thinking and writing about pop culture ephemera, at Alert Nerd (for geek stuff) and Pop Geek (for everything else). …

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