BIB KIDS walked into Ed Zed’s domain & he’ll never be the same, please allow him to explain…
Anxiety is a feeling with which I’m intimately familiar. This is not necessarily a negative thing, as I honestly doubt I’d be able to function without it. Sometimes though, I’m whipped into a veritable lather of irrational anxiety when I consider that a certain beloved band out there amidst the teeming masses might never have crossed my path at all. (Like the state of being dead, I suppose one could argue that you wouldn’t know what you were missing, but that’s beside the point.)
Last night, on a chance recommendation I heard Auckland’s phenomenal BIB KIDS for the first time, and by god, that anxiety went into overdrive.
The duo’s new single ‘100 degrees’ is a deliciously menacing shock of avant-pop that bristles with energy, compelling the humble listener to rise to its feet in an immediate hangman’s dance.
A trance-y synth swirls in a foreboding vortex around an electronic beat that sounds pleasingly like it’s being played by an actual human as opposed to having merely been programmed by one.
This sets the scene for Tash van Schaardenburg’s magnificently insouciant vocal, slowly ratcheting up the track’s muggy tension with lines like ‘suns down, moons up / forecast says its rain / I feel the weather shifting / I feel my mind gone drifting / let’s talk about locality and this eventuality / when we go home just you and me / we’ll change the seasons in my sheets’.
This is strange, serrated pop at its very best. Stop what you’re doing, buy it now on Bandcamp, and look out for a BIB KIDS EP ‘Gimp Software’, released in March.
Do not miss it. End transmission.
PICKING UP ROCKS 