Kid 606 - Down With The Scene

Along with a bunch of other youngsters on the American scene, Kid 606 is raising some hell with a laptop and tons of gadgets and desktop fuckery. Along with cohorts like Lesser and Cex (amongst others), he's throwing a monkey wrench into the electronic music scene with music and statements that not only tries to tear holes in genres, but pokes a whole lot of fun at the scene in general. He and pals have skewered hip-hop, glitch, and drum and bass into a steaming mess of electronics that will have most people scratching their head, but some laughing along at the inside jokes and making some sense of it all.

I'm one of those people who falls somewhere in the middle ground in regards to what I think. Since this disc (one of his first), Kid 606 has released a smorgasboard of other releases, encorporating different styles and again treading new ground. For an artist who tries to confound listeners, he's certainly done it to me.

Down With The Scene starts out with an 18 second track ironically called "Chart Topping Radio Hit" that will send you scrambling for the volume knob on your stereo with three sharp blasts of garbled feedback. It's like a sonic kick in the teeth, but at least he lets you know what you're in for right away. On the second track ("Luke Vibert Can Kiss My Indie-Punk Whiteboy Ass"), the BPMS get cranked up into some hyperkinetic drill and bass concoction while mixing in some silly samples before the entire track drops off into a feedback-laden hip-hop deconstruction with another looped sample that will make you chuckle if you haven't already. Oh yeah, and the entire track clocks in at about 2 and a half minutes.

The harsh, glitch-filled drill and bass tracks continue on "Buffalo606-The Morning After" and "Kidrush" (which bangs especially hard and fast and mixes in a sample talking about Kevin Mitnick) before mixing things up a bit with the almost pop sounding "Secrets 4 Sale." The goofy little sing-along is by no means something you'd hear on Top 40 anytime soon, but it manages to blend an almost R+B sound into the quirked out electronics. Showing that he's more than just feedback and rumbling beats, he even manages to nicely pull off a nice, melodic track in "For When Yr Just Happy To Be Alive." Of course, it's followed up by the static-drenched sound-collage "It'll Take Millions In Plastic Surgery To Make Me Black."

The disc closes out with the awesome remix by Hvatski that mixes in samples of a kitten over huge beats, as well as a computer-voiced singalong. It's a nice ending to a semi-inconsistent album, but one that perks up my interest enough to check out other releases by the Kid. Overall, the album definitely has some interesting points and mixes up styles a fair amount, but the noise tends to just overwhelm after awhile. The release is a little more structured than a disc like Lesser's Gearhound, but still tends to drift toward the noise quotient quite often. If you don't mind the schizo jungle beats and layers of feedback (imagine Atari Teenage Riot stripped of vocals and an attention span), this is a pretty decent place to start.

Rating: 6.25

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