Review Summary: Houston, the party is go
The reasons behind the appeal of
The Kids Must Die elude me. I honestly have no idea why I like it as much as I do. It’s sure as hell not the idea of the music - the EP sounds like the offspring of some bewildering relationship between the “scene-tronica” of Breathe Carolina and the blinding hip-hop of Rustie and Cashmere Cat, some shotgun-wedding situation in which The Glitch Mob played the role of both priest and obstetrician. Nor is it the way it was marketed - it appeared somewhere in the foggy depths of a potentially questionable subsection of Reddit, as opposed to the safe, well-formatted pages of the e-zines from which I typically discover new music. I don’t even think there was a specific moment which drew me in - over the course of half an hour, I gradually became addicted to the saccharine synths and menacing kicks.
If I had to hazard a guess as to what, exactly, appealed to me, I guess I’d posit that the release is simply the neat, tidy packaging of a few disparate influences I like. It’s nothing particularly trail-blazing, sure, but I’m a sucker for anything that takes the good bits of something I like a lot (read: cheesy-as-sh
it trap, Day-Glo synths) and applies a dusting of separate styles (warbling Auto-Tune, straight-laced house) to create a tasty pairing. “Samsara” is large and flamboyant as most good hip-hop is, with its pulsing 808s and succulent claps, but the garagey vibe it occupies on a whim disorients the song and sends it off-course towards a totally different planet. It’s confusing, it’s strange, but it’s alluring.
And I guess all
The Kids Must Die needs to do to succeed is be alluring. Its somewhat novel combination of elements makes it a worthwhile release, quality of said elements notwithstanding. It’s always nice to see some dance-based hip-hop push past the threshold of “large bass and nasally lead synth,” and however unfortunate it might be that our standards are so low at this point,
The Kids Must Die is, if nothing else, interesting. It’s party music, through and through, from the sluggish vocals of “Babel” to the outer-space synth-pop of “Return,” and it reconciles the two oft-separated worlds of hedonistic fun and originality surprisingly well - and in today’s day and age, that’s a wonderful thing.
