Soundbite: Black Kids

Seemingly shot out of the Internet hype machine’s well-oiled cannon, Black Kids, from Jacksonville, Fla., cycled through the stages of blog excitement ““ critical praise and immediate backlash ““ late last year before the band could hook a record deal, tour the greater U.S. or even release a physical product of any kind.

The source of this common hype cycle, a few notable festival appearances and a MySpace page featuring four poorly recorded demos, showcased an inviting hook-filled brand of electro-pop and plenty of people willing to place judgment on the band as hastily as the Kids rose in Internet prominence. The band received both earnest adoration and seething vitriol, earning rave reviews from some major publications while inspiring some critics, such as Idolator.com’s Jess Harvell, to compose 2,000-word diatribes on why no one should be writing about Black Kids.

Certainly, this pronounced Internet love-hate relationship with new bands is typical to the vicissitudes of modern Internet taste-making (This year, Vampire Weekend and No Age experienced similar cycles.).

And for a band such as Black Kids, with a styling equal parts warm and derivative, hyperbolic love and unmitigated hate come with the territory. Their apparent influences ““ The Cure, New Order, any new wave band ““ are both standard-fare crowd-pleasers and somewhat outdated. The Black Kids are more or less a composite of early-aughts indie touchstones: fuzzed-out guitar, synths seemingly purchased from a Hot Hot Heat yard sale, Peter Hook-aping bass and guy-girl chants straight out of The Go! Team’s playbook. Skeptics could argue this is production-line indie-pop: a band carefully and cynically designed to take advantage of hype generated by short-attention-span MP3 blogging, a semi-provocative name and the good fortune of a positive Pitchfork review along the way.

Yet, removed from the discussions of incessant Internet hype circles, Black Kids are simply a pretty fun, modest guitar-pop act with a few populist dance-floor anthems to their name. “Partie Traumatic,” the Black Kids’ debut album after all the ballyhoo, is, at its heart, an ingratiating summer record, designed not to divide but to unite pop fans.

Producer Bernard Butler, the ex-guitarist of former hype-magnet Suede, deserves serious credit for the album’s crystalline production, which adds clarity and nuance in comparison to the muddy, reverb-addled demos. If not vindicating the next-big-thing status that Black Kids have acquired, the songs on “Partie Traumatic” at least show some promising sonic dynamics between glowing synths, a sloppy rhythm section and Robert Smith-esque caterwauls.

Singer and guitarist Reggie Youngblood grounds Black Kids as a pretty charming dude, using Positive K’s 1992 hit, “I Got a Man,” to pick up a betrothed girl and covering Sophie B. Hawkins’ “Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover” as the B-side to their first single. The personas Youngblood evokes on record are equal parts cocksure and self-deprecating, certainly fitting the Kids’ precarious position of releasing a debut album as a prematurely over-hyped new band.

“You’re not doing too well,” Youngblood opines midway through the album, “all the blogs are about you, girl.” Even when Youngblood’s lyrical ambitions outweigh his wit ““ he occasionally plays with gender ambiguity like a C-plus student of Morrissey, for example, “You are the girl that I’ve been dreaming of / Ever since I was a little girl,” and the body and mind exchange with his sister Ali on the bridge of “Listen to Your Body Tonight” comes off as inspiringly insipid, his posturing is at least met with a self-aware shrug. A keyboard sound simulating a groan follows the self-consciously limp lines on “I’ve Underestimated My Charm (Again),” and the back-up vocals of Ali Youngblood and Dawn Watley playfully mock some of Reggie Youngblood’s lyrical indulgences.

Unfortunately, the promise of the Black Kids is tempered by the fact that the highlights of “Partie Traumatic” are the polished versions of their initial four MySpace demos.

Proper lead single “I’m Not Going to Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance with You” remains insidiously catchy with luminous synth lines that The Cars would have been glad to produce in their prime, although Ric Ocasek would have had the audacity to couple this with a barely contained drive and a hook punctuated by female chants of “Dance! Dance! Dance!.” “Hurricane Jane,” with atmospheric electronics and whispered verses, echoes The Cure, while Youngblood manages to evoke loneliness without succumbing to Robert Smith’s patent melancholy, crying, “It’s Friday night and I ain’t got nobody/ So what’s the use of making the bed?”

Much of the remainder of “Partie” suggests an abundance of hooks to compensate for some hasty songwriting. Recycling the formulaic suspected-affair lyrical conceit, “Love Me Already” feels rushed, each section standing on its own without creating a fully formed whole. “Look at Me (When I Rock Wichoo)” throws playground chants, references to the apocalypse, tempo changes and endless sonic embellishments against the wall to see what sticks, closing the album with a chaotic mess rather than a crystallization of the Kids’ strengths.

Ultimately, “Partie Traumatic” is unlikely to convince fans or critics that the band is any more or less deserving of praise or contempt, but it is a fun and engaging listen that deserves interest on its own merits. But to get truly interesting music, we might have to wait for the Black Kids to mature into, um, Black Adults.

““ Ross Rinehart

E-mail Rinehart at [email protected].