Sam Wolfson meets Black Kids, the Californian quintet that has the music press in a froth.
It's not yet clear whether Black Kids are beneficiaries or victims of the tidal wave of hype they've been surfing. Since September, when the Guardian made them their new band of the day, there's been a race to see who can champion them as 'their own'. Pitchfork wrote about them, referencing the Guardian piece. Soon the NME caught on, discussing both the Pitchfork and Guardian articles. Before long Vice, The New York Times and Rolling Stone had joined in. All of it cross-referenced coverage from other media sources.
Suddenly Black Kids were trapped in a web of propaganda: tipped by everyone purely on the basis that everyone else was tipping them. At one point things got so intense that the band, who are yet to release a proper single, locked themselves in the studio and refused to do any interviews.
Of course behind the growing column inches of press attention is the reason everyone was getting so excited about the band in the first place. Hailing from Jacksonville in California, (a city not famed for its contributions to music: its only other major artists are controversial dad rockers Lynyrd Skynyrd and embarrassing nu-metalers Limp Bizkit) Black Kids have a sound that is nostalgic yet modern. Their unintelligible yelps of crude emotion and desperate accounts of getting lonely instead of getting lucky are charged with angst without being adolescent.
In fact, if anything, they're quite adult. 'As a teenager I was well-behaved, but I'm 25-years-old and I can sing about dirty shit,' explains keyboard player and vocalist Dawn Watley, excusing lines like 'They caught you in the park after dark/giving head to a statue.'
OMM saw the Kids play at the Nambucca pub in north London to see how those lyrics go down with an all-ages crowd that includes, among other pre-teens, Bernard Butler's little 'uns and a fair few punters not yet out of nappies. Indeed, apart from the industry and press people, Black Kids are some of the oldest people in attendance. At a time where kids are getting top ten singles before their GCSEs, it's refreshing to hear a band for whom the Strokes are not music's year zero.
Instead the band are influenced by the guitar music of their childhood. The messy lo-fi racket of My Bloody Valentine is prominent, as is the Cure's knack for brooding melodies that break your heart. The introspective, self-deprecating honesty of Echo and the Bunnymen is also present. It does sometimes seem like Black Kids came in the Tardis from 1988. Lead singer Reggie Youngblood even sports a John McEnroe-esque perm set off with a pair of battered Adidas sneakers. But Black Kids are more than another gaggle of Eighties revivalists looking to re-hash the former glories of their idols. They've got something that most nerdy alt-rock geeks never will: girls.
Black Kids' female contingent turn dreamy noise-pop into all-empowering, sing-it-from-the-rooftops dance anthems. Imagine Sonic Youth infiltrated with handclaps, synth hooks and doo-wop backing vocals.
'The guys are into quite different stuff from the girls,' says Reggie's sister, synth player Ali Youngblood. 'We're big Prince fans, we're into R&B and soul. When I was little, my mom wouldn't let me change the radio station so I ended up listening to Otis Reading and Al Green and loving it.' To understand how these far-flung influences come together to form a coherent pop band, you need to see Black Kids live. On stage they commandeer their obvious musical talent to create an immense soundscape, and then dance around in it doing Diana Ross finger wags. They charm the audience without pandering to them. And for a band who have previously described themselves as 'unfortunate-looking', there is something charismatically beautiful about these West coast misfits when they perform.
Black Kids prove the tipsters right by succeeding at something that many of last year's 'new-rave' bands failed to do: shove dance and rock so hard against each other that something completely new spurts out the middle. It might be clichéd to admit it, but not since four spotty youths from Sheffield sang about looking good on the dancefloor has hype ever been so justified.
