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Listen to your body tonight. They made themselves up, and they're strictly for real.
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The lyrics run, uh, let’s say straightforward, but Black Kids know as well as any good sentimentalists that delivery is everything; teenage yearning couldn’t hope for a much better vehicle than their pouting power pop.
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Yet for all their more ridiculous tendencies, Youngblood and Co. have a real knack for crafting achingly romantic synth-pop tunes in the vein of the Cure and the Psychedelic Furs.
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FilterReggie Youngblood's honest and witty dialogue of jealousy, loniness, and egotism vents interior frustrations while the other Kids synthesize sulk along the way. [Summer 2008, p.97]]
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Pay no attention to the hype--after all, it didn't do Vampire Weekend any harm--and sit back and listen to one of the most purely enjoyable albums of this year.
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Partie Traumatic is the sexiest, most outrageous outright pop album of ’08 so far, hard not to love and (seemingly) even easier to lay.
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Almost everything here sounds like a hit waiting to happen, equipped with a tune strong enough to be heard above the hype--or the hype about the hype or the people complaining about the hype about the hype--and memorable enough to make the idea that Black Kids will be forgotten by Christmas seem a highly unlikely suggestion
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Youngbloods triumph with unpretentious pop.
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Kissing goodbye to the obsolete racial and gender roles that pop, hip-hop, or indie rock still demand, Youngblood and pals throw a thrillingly subversive victory party to lift the country out of eight years of anguish.
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UrbBlack Kids' conviction and raw talent has made for a record that far outshines a majority of their blog brethren. [Jul/Aug 2008, p.84]
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The group's rocket ride appears to have preserved its more appealingly eccentric tendencies: frontman Reggie Youngblood's ridiculous yelp of a singing voice, for instance, or Dawn Watley's ultra-cheesy synth lines, which quote pretty much every new wave hit of the '80s.
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Black Kids merits your attention, and Partie Traumatic is a confident, fun debut.
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MojoThe space disco of 'I've Underestimated My Charm (Again)' and Listen To Your Body Tonight' are destines for repeat plays on this summer's festival circuit. [Aug 2008, p.106]
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Q MagazineThe truth is that Youngblood writes terrific, instantly memorable pop songs, their fashionable new-wave cool rubbing against an urgent, almost disco undertow. [Aug 2008, p.141]
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Partie Traumatic is a very good debut that manages to earn a huge chunk of the hype that was thrown willy-nilly in the band's direction.
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Black Kids’ peppy songs juggle yelpy Cure-style lead vocals, beats from the intersection of new wave and disco, wordplay (“Hit the Heartbrakes,” “I get angst in my pants”), comic synthesizer squeals and, under it all, enough ache to justify all that desperate sublimation.
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While they could tone down the synth on their next effort, this disc definitely lives up to the hype.
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The Florida band's music is pleasingly random, too. One minute they're new romantics or dour indie kids, then, before youve had a chance to draw breath, they're apeing the Ronettes.
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Moving basslines and driving, bouncy drumming run under brass backing, bright keys and group-sung vocal harmonies throughout Partie Traumatic's joyous entirety.
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None of it is revolutionary, and all of it is so steeped in early-'80s new wave that it's tempting to dismiss Black Kids as mere revivalists. But their revisions have verve.
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With Brit-pop vet Bernard Butler behind the decks, these Floridians still toss out an impressive 10-song party grenade.
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Youngblood's tunes are so clever it's easy to overlook the commitment to new wave it took for him to avoid wasting his love of wordplay on folk music. [Aug 2008, p.84]
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As far as eagerly anticipated debuts go, Partie Traumatic is loose and unforced in its extreme eagerness to please.
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Alternative PressThe underwhelming title cut underscores the superiority of the first four Black Kids songs, but their transition from MySpace to major label is an overall success. [Sep 2008, p.162]
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UncutThere's some interesting things going on here.... Sadly, Bernard Butler's production often feels thin and tinny, which isn't just sad, but avoidable, too. [Aug 2008, p.92]
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The Black Kids may only have one trick, but as long as they only pull it at a house party, it’s the only one they’ll need.
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This debut--while not a technically poor album, boasting as it does pop hooks aplenty if you truly focus in, beyond the sometimes irritating vocal tennis--sags where it should soar, dips where it should peak.
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While Youngblood fills his sardonic twinkle with playful sexual allusions and gender ambiguity, there’s too many clunky lines and rhymes-for-rhyming’s sake for Partie Traumatic to be anything more than lyrically intriguing.
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While there's a certain bubblegum synth-pop allure and cheeky lyrical irony in songs like 'I've Underestimated My Charm (Again),' it's hard to find ourselves being carried away on youthful pluck and preciousness alone.
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Under The RadarFrom start to finish, they slather Partie Traumatic in quirk and tirelessly recycle the scrappy sonics of 'I'm Not Gonna Teach,' playing them out until even that gem of a single loses its luster. [Fall 2008, p.79]
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This is nothing even remotely new, but very rarely does it come off so obnoxiously, indelibly built to not be taken seriously when that’s the very action that could save these assholes from their own doom.
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Black Kids are trying too hard, plain and simple.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 25 out of 40
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Mixed: 6 out of 40
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Negative: 9 out of 40
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Jul 26, 2021i give a ten because the musics is so f_cking nice !!! One of the best songs i never listen in my entire life 10 10
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JimmieA.Sep 5, 2008To bad that no new songs appeared on this one, but there are so many great songs that you don't mind hearing them over and over again.
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BrianS.Aug 18, 2008