Kid British/Electric Sex/Japandroids

Time to catch up!

Kid British - It Was This or Football...
I'm a sucker for British pop, especially the upbeat/dancy variety, but Kid British is just too sugary for me. If you took the absolute worst aspects of Madness and mediocre 90's pop (think New Radicals), then you'd have Kid British. There are some stand-out tracks like 'Our House is Dadless' and 'Lost in London,' but they are worth hearing only because the formersamples Madness along with a decent beat and the latter has a good feel akin to the Streets first hit 'Let's Push Things Forward.' The ideas seem to be there, but the pop aspect is a full-on fail. Maybe they should have chosen football.

Grade: 3.3

Electric Six - Kill

Electric Six, who brought us the great 'Gay Bar' years ago, comes back with Kill and while it's dangerously close to being really good-it's relentless style changes and themes of over the top machismo kills most songs on this record. Anthemic dance beats usually give way to over-powering, Green Jelly/Ugly Kid Joe style guitars and it just doesn't mesh well. I liked the tracks 'My Idea of Fun,' which had a good progression and actually lacked the masculine aggression present on 90% of the record, and 'White Eyes,' which had a tolerable beat and a White Lies (the band) feel to the track despite the more terrible lyrics. Overall, yuck.

Grade: 2.6

Japandroids - Post-Nothing

A decent record, finally. Vancouver, B.C.'s garage rock is pretty good on record and imagine it's thrilling live. If you are into the Thermals, the Henry Clay People, or Titus Andronicus, etc. then you'll like Japandroids. I do think the Japandroids have some growing yet to do in order to be a really good band. The progressions and songwriting are not just up to par with bands like the Thermals yet. The songs lean keenly forward over the beat pushing tracks, like 'The Boys Are Leaving Town,' forward nicely, but not too much to make it uncomfortable to the listener. Emotion carries the band through the initial tracks, especially coming clean on 'Young Hearts Spark Fire,' but then falls flat. The band seems to blow it's 'load early and lose its electricity soon after the first few tracks regressing to sound more like a early 90's Dinosaur Jr. demo tape that was thrown away for good reason.

Grade: 4.2