If you were on the ball enough to pick up this Jacksonville quintet's "Wizard of Aaahs" EP as a free download from their MySpace page last year, and have been eagerly awaiting this debut album ever since, it could prove a little disappointing. Of the ten songs featured here, four made up the EP, and, sadly for Partie Traumatic, they're its four strongest tracks. True, they have had another spin on the mixing desk leading to a much sharper, cleaner and professional sound, as well as a new insight that comes from first hearing what were once indecipherable words. If lyrics like "You were trying to hex me/all telling me I'm sexy/yeah, always trying to text me" on formulaic pop tune Listen To Your Body Tonight, are intended to be tongue-in-cheek, this is hilariously delightful. If not, their arbitrary rhyming and adolescent appeal are hilariously painful.
The flip side is that this new production style all but destroys the soft fuzzy edge that characterised Black Kids and made them stand out from their peers, leaving them with a more crystalline and conventional sound. Really the only one of the four EP tracks that benefited from this "re-vamp" is current single Hurricane Jane as its thin guitar riff now rings out with fresh clarity.
All that said, there's enough fun '80s style synth-pop and ragged guitar, modernised with à la mode chant-style vocals plus a pinch of '60s girlband harmonies, to make this record perfectly acceptable pre-night-on-the-town listening for the indie kid, before it inevitably ends up thrown somewhere at the back of your CD collection.
