Black Kids worthy of buzz

Black Kids are another classic case of careers built on MySpace.com.

By Jordan Sargent

Published Oct. 5, 2007

The story of Black Kids goes approximately something like this: Five fresh-faced teens play scene-stealing show at this past August's Athens Pop Festival. Bloggers took notice, and by turn, so did real-life publications. Within a month, we're reading write-ups and blurbs in Vice Magazine, Pitchfork and NME. And that's basically where it ends.

Black Kids - yes, two of their five members actually are black - as they stand now, are another classic case of "What MySpace.com Can Do For You." We've all read about how much that devilish social networking site has changed the music business forever. It's why Christina Aguilera is as much a household name as Lily Allen or Tila Tequila. But for all the words spent mythologizing how MySpace has benefited artists, much less is written about how it's benefiting consumers.

Black Kids are case in point: a fantastic, young, unsigned pop band with one EP, Wizard of Ahhhs, available for download on their MySpace. They're lucky writers for national magazines - and probably label execs, fairly soon - that can access their MP3s from their offices, and we're lucky that we can, too.

In a great year for young indie-pop bands, Black Kids shine brightest because they mean it the most. Like most of the best indie bands, or at least my favorites, their songs swell and build until they sound as though they're ready to burst or completely fall apart. The four-song Wizard of Ahhhs is the work of a young band overcome with really good ideas: spidery guitar lines, syrupy synth melodies and brilliant dual harmonies. That they don't rush to reveal them, or waste them all on one song, is almost as impressive as the songs themselves.

Opener "Hit the Heartbrakes" is hardly the EP's stand out, but the fact that it holds its own next to the rest of the songs reveals just why Black Kids are so strikingly good. The song doesn't have the band's best hooks or instrumentation, but with repeated listens, it exposes itself as a deep, nuanced song. (This is important.) On first listen, you'll dig the ecstatic guitar solo, but later you'll realize that guitarist Reggie Youngblood had been building up to it underneath more dominant vocals and keyboards throughout the song's previous 2 1/2 minutes. Introduction, plot, climax. Dudes are thinkers.

"Hit the Heartbrakes" is a telling song. The two that directly follow it are two of the most stunning pop songs I've heard all year, but they reward immediately. "Hit the Heartbrakes" shows that Black Kids are not two-hit wonder but instead a band worth sticking around for.

Those two songs, "I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You" and "Hurricane Jane," are epic and epochal songs that would make these guys huge if backlash against internet-hyped bands wasn't so vicious nowadays. Both are pop songs that sound like they were made by introverts pining for the spotlight. The sentiments - love, desperation, loneliness, friendship, (you know, real light stuff) - are so earnest it's nearly impossible not to swoon and be sucked into their world.

Nearly everything on both songs is perfect. Youngblood delivers each like he's singing into his bathroom mirror when no one's home, and the keyboards on each song convey the yearning nearly as well as he does.

With any luck, Black Kids are just getting started. If that's true, we might be staring at one of the better bands of the past few years: young dudes who pack more primal emotion, and not bullshit, than bands such as Rilo Kiley could ever dream of. Do yourself a favor and enjoy it while you can.