Synergy! Today in The Japan Times, I reviewed Turbo Town, the new album from rock-dance duo 80Kidz. Read it here. The nitty gritty of it – Turbo Town is a very good album with occasional great moments, but it’s also an album where 80Kidz end up sabotaging themselves by not being confident enough to do away with Western guest singers. Overall, a good album, but one that could have been better.
80Kidz-pal Baroque offers up a rework of “Mind The Gap,” a cut from Turbo Town that does a good job of summing up 80Kidz’s strengths. The first half of the track brings to mind the head-clanging noise of the group’s first album This Is My Shit, all pounding and harsh synth blasts. This would have been annoying if it was all 80Kidz decided to do on “Mind The Gap,” but they wisely switch the song into something moodier and less aggressive for the homestretch. Baroque doesn’t split the song in half like 80Kidz did on the original – he uses the softer sections as buffers between the face-scratching passages, ending with a Death-Star bang rather than a whimper. Listen below.
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