Kid606 – Resilience (Tigerbeat6)
It’s funny what returning to an album after a while can do for ones appreciation of it. When I first heard Resilience, I was immensely pleased. It seemed that the inordinately talented joker of electronic music (OK, there are a few, admittedly) had finally ‘matured’, and in doing so, produced the album of his career thus far.
I always wished Richard ‘Aphex’ James could have played it straight at least once in the past decade. He’s another artist of the computer with a ton of talent, but it seemed he just wanted to make silly noises to diminishing returns rather than an actual album. It’s his prerogative, I suppose, but on hearing that the Kid had ‘gone straight’ I was made up.
The album is really well composed, and has energy when it needs to, never having to drop into pure noise. The melodies are cool, the album unfolds well, and it just seemed very satisfying.
So I listened to it again for the purposes of this list, and something changed. The album is still the same well-crafted slice of mature electronica, but could it be that in the cold light of day it’s just a tad… boring?
Some of the songs are still really good, such as ‘Spanish Song’ and ‘Phoenix Riddim’, but as a whole it just drags, and never reaches the levels of beauty of many other, similarly ‘mature’ albums of this year. I never thought I’d find myself wishing Kid606 was still a noisy ADHD simulator, but there you go. Maybe he could have left growing up for later.
throughsilver in blog 