Review Summary: Snappy, energetic bleeps and bloops for those with a noisy taste
Back in the days when making music on your home computer was a brand new phenomenon and it took hours to load a simple .jpeg image on the internet there came a young producer who referred to himself as
Kid606. Growing up with a steady diet of
Nine Inch Nails,
Godflesh, and
Whitehouse(!?!), Kid606 made the decision use his equipment to make one of the noisiest electronic albums of the late 90’s. In result, he made
Don’t Sweat the Technics.
While it might sound like aimless noise for some people upon first listen, the songs (or at least most of them) surprisingly have a lot of structure to them. They are layered, if not densely, and the synthesizers are strangely textured. In “Silveregg”, they sound like water washing through your head with a buzz. “Dropkick- Tomgirl’s Gonna Stick With It” is an assault of drum beats that topple one another with a snarky, quick to bite attitude, and they are entertaining as hell.
You could make the argument that “it’s not sophisticated enough" and that it’s "just silly noise”, and with that I’d respond with “who cares? It’s fun as hell to listen to!” When I first got my hands on this record I could not stop listening to it. “Don’t Sweat the Technics-Dubplatestyle” has a very bouncy and playful groove to it, the drums are fat and hypnotizing, and the track is layered with synths slithering in and out in an almost unnoticeable way. It took me repeated listens to actually notice the many synths, loops, and samples that were being played in the track, and I’m still not 100% sure if I noticed all of them.
However, when you have an album with over an hour of material, you are practically promised to have some useless, skippable tracks. Whether it be the aimless tracks like “Rescute” that just wander around, or the short, pointless “segway” tracks like “She’s=Defectiv”, which literally sounds like a back to school ad being played through a scratched CD. To put it short, the album can be very hit or miss at times.
To put it short, Kid606 debuted in a scene of noisy electronic artists with a weird, but fun album chock full of snappy, energetic bleeps and bloops that dig holes in your ears and stay in them for days. It has its ups and downs, but what album doesn’t?
