Black Kids
Partie Traumatic

I read an article some time ago complaining about the scarcity of young Italian talents in the music field. To think about it, one can't help but agree. There are plenty of groups and soloists over thirty, if not beyond forty (not to mention the over-50s, of which there are plenty), but finding a budding rocker is quite a daunting task. As playful as the topic may be, the trend is truly concerning and, at the moment, it seems highly unlikely to foresee a generational change.

The situation is quite different across the border - in truth, more in terms of quantity than quality - and if we think of some young talent like Conor Oberst (alias Bright Eyes), just twenty-eight and already with a decent career behind him, or Alex Turner (born in 1986) on track with the Arctic Monkeys and the Last Shadow Puppets (debatable, but that's that), the perspective takes on a whole different appearance.

The Black Kids are a very young quintet from Jacksonville (Florida) and with "Partie Traumatic," this past July, they released their first full-length. Passed over in silence in our parts, the Black Kids have achieved a fair amount of visibility in their homeland and even more so in the land of Albion.

From the booklet attached to the CD, it's hard to discern the five's features, but searching online, we find ourselves facing five youthful kids - two females and three males - who would have anything but the physique du role of any teenage rock band. The aura of suspicion and the fear of approaching a work by five barely twenty-somethings seem at least obligatory. Ten tracks for as many potential singles, that's the crux of the matter.

A mix of sparkling sounds that hark back to a certain mid-eighties synth-pop, and for once - while acknowledging my partial subjectivity for that period - do we want to try to accept it and take it from the positive side instead of always seeing just plastic in that decade? We are in the realm of a Robert Smith twenty-five years younger (and also twenty-five kilos lighter), completely unmasked and disenchanted. The vocal timbre of their leader Reggie Youngblood distinctly echoes the prince of dark, especially in the higher registers. Songs quite immediate and easy to assimilate, sweetened just right so as not to fall into the commonplace, which, as is known, when the subject matter is pop in its purest song form, the risk of being banal is always lurking with the consequent concrete probability of crossing the thin line between good and bad taste.

Well, the Black Kids may well be devastatingly derivative (but who isn't these days!), and they will certainly face accusations of being tagged as late-arriving epigones of the eighties, but this album glides smoothly along and who cares if this is music for teenagers. They sometimes remind me of Phoenix, sometimes of the Go! Team, sometimes of the Killers, sometimes of MGMT—all blended, shaken, and served with a zest of the lighter, more spirited Cure. Produced with taste and a sense of moderation by Bernard Butler, former guitarist of Suede.

Get in the car, hit the highway, put on this record, and singing it at the top of your lungs, you'll realize you can't help but move around and bang your hands on the steering wheel to the rhythm of these five rascals who, if nothing else, have a great desire to have fun.