Kid 606 - The Illnes EP

For those of you wondering whether Kid 606's head would be after releasing the warm ambient Why I Love Life EP less than a year ago, the answer is simply "far away from that quiet place." Getting back to his pranksterish, gabba-loving, beat-spewing self, The Illness EP is 25 minutes of new music, and a karate kick in your general direction. Although it's listed as an advance CD single for his upcoming release on Ipecac Records, the release has a couple bonus tracks to fill things out a bit, and although they feel a bit tagged-on, none of them feel throwaway.

Starting out the disc is the 12" mix of the title track "The Illness," and based on the sounds of it alone, Kid 606 is amped to the max. It's a 7-minute of speed-rush old-school techno blurred alongside a healthy dose of gabber and noise. There are some silly samples and a few spots for breathers, but the track is mainly about smacking you upside the head. If the opening track doesn't kickstart you enough, he comes back with another gabba/breakbeat slam in the almost 9 minutes of "Ecstacy Motherfucker." It's twisted full of juicy acid bursts, snare rushes galore, huge bass hits, and enough bounce for a candy raver who has eaten way too many candy neclaces (or something else).

After the almost 16-minute of 160 bpm-plus, things fortunately slow down a bit on the remainder of the release. "Maybe" is a mid-tempo chugger with soupy low-end and accordian played by Kevin Blechdom that is filtered until unrecognizable. "Evasion" arrives as one of the most effective songs on the album, a creepy track that purrs with thick sub bass while some filtered glitches and flanged melodies slither out on top of it. "Circumvent" closes the release with just under 2 minutes of slightly unsettling ambience, and that's all it wrote. 25 minutes of music, 16 of which is aimed straight at your hyperactive ass. It's a good tease for his upcoming full-length (tenatively titled Kill Sound Before Sound Kills You), and hopefully he allows it to have a smidge more variety. The speed-demon tracks are nice, but a full album of it might be too much of a kick in the head.

Rating: 7

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