Kid Carpet - 'Ideas & Oh Dears' (Tired & Lonesome)
3/5
By: Michael Lewin
Before we can do the sort of stuff we need to do to talk about the Kid's debut enterprise, to be slightly analytical, vaguely dispassionate, your reviewer has something he really needs to get off his chest. I need to proclaim something from the foot of the highest mountain, having ascended it myself to bring down the stone tablet I hold in one hand, my other clutching a staff, dressed in a flowing, impressive robe, adorned with beard: armed with all these aspects to ensure intense, genuine purpose and give a sense of the truth of my words, I need to proclaim to the assembled masses, you, dear rockfeedback readers, that I find this a deeply, deeply irritating album. It hurts me, in my ears, my brain, in the tips of my fingers as I type. But this is a personal response: I still believe you should listen to it, out of both a desire to share my suffering and because, despite being one of t-h-e m-o-s-t g-o-d-d-a-m-n a-n-n-o-y-i-n-g things I've ever encountered, it offers genuine rewards. In its own, cheap and cheerful way.
Only irritation, a desire for fun and Kid's voice unite this as a work, such is its genre-hopping insanity. The musical kleptomania is a compound-adjective-loving writer's dream: lo-fi-shit-poodle-rock-hoppin' electro, perhaps? Except that wouldn't really include the children's TV-themes, nor Bjork in a particularly squalid English storm ('It's A Bit Windy Love'), or Pop Will Eat Itself raving with Depeche Mode ('Sick of the Future') or the infamous use of toy instruments. Homeboy's got some serious schizo tendencies. This quality of 'Ideas & Oh Dears' indicates just one reason for it to be a worthwhile listen; it could happily be aligned with Anticon gratemaster Why?'s debut or with his cLOUDEAD project, with labelmate and sometime collaborator Odd Nosdam, Beck's early output or even with Prefuse 73. The leftfield willingness to challenge and assault quirkily is just as evident (and at times successful) here as it is with those likeminded experimentalists. It is because of this variety, though, that to discuss particular favourites musically seems absurd. 'Ideas & Oh Dears', remember? Mistakes and victories, but, like Kid, I'm unwilling to differentiate; you deserve the chance to make opinions uncoloured by those of someone else with an album like this, knowing the good and the bad can quite easily follow each other, and being certain it's all pretty ugly.
That there's something for everyone musically is fine, but doesn't make for exceptional or essential listening, right? 'A couple of fun, novelty songs and stuff like other stuff that I've already got alongside a bunch of wank? F**k that for a lark, I'm putting some Magnetic Fields on' is presumably your attitude. However, the musical mania is just a frame for Kid's real talent, you could easily presume. He's a lyrical genius in the domestic-observant mould, on a par with Albarn up to 'The Great Escape' or Mike Skinner: that kind of peculiarly British social commentator who revels in painting a vaguely depressing but undoubtedly witty picture of dole queues, chavs and banality.
'Your Love' deconstructs any of the beauty left to be found in the concept (it's not like he's the first to attempt it, really) with a brilliantly sarcastic, repetitious refrain that encompasses both the movie-packaged hope and every painful, mundane truth of lower-middle-class marriage. Hats off to him, chaps. Similar props go to lyrics like 'you got a carrier bag/which you put in all your doubts/and you carry 'em about' for picking apart the paranoia and alienation underlying a consumer culture, as well as countless others throughout. There's a lot going on lyrically, fo'sho', which, like with the intense irony and knowingness of 'Shiny Shiny New', is occasionally allowed to tie in with the aesthetic of the sound: the electro-rock of that track has a feel of a deliberately, commercially packaged new music fad, which allows it a successful conjoining with Kid's lyrical focus on the trite, disposable feel of suburban, municiple architecture. He's full of it, and I'm sure it's all completely intentional.
Which, by the way, IS THE MONSTROUS PROBLEM WITH THE WHOLE THING.
The irritation factor, once more, must rear its head. It isn't merely the disposable novelty of the effort, nor the multiple-identity problems, nor the deliberately hair-raising, there-are-needles-under-my-skin-and-I'd-like-it-to-please-stop-now grating wince that is often caused by 'Ideas & Oh Dears' that makes it irritating. But nor can it be completely saved by the rigorous cleverness of his ideas or lyrics; rather, these saving graces could ultimately condemn him to a special and unusual area of hell. Both the genius and annoyance evident in this album all relate to a necessary and inherent wink - not merely a big, pointless, superficial wink as with, say, The Darkness, but a desperately annoying wink from every lyric, beat, riff, synth, gust of wind or answer-phone message that the album contains. He's too clever-clever, too whimsical and too smug. Of course, 'Ideas and Oh Dears' is not to be taken particularly seriously, and I'm happy to admit my readings of his lyrics are a bit over the top.
But you cannot escape the fact that, well, it isn't at all pleasurable. It's the Chesney Hawkes skit that does it for me. There's too much in it. 'I am a one-trick pony/that's what somebody said about me.' It's too aware of the fact that Kid himself could be accused of being a 'one-trick pony', and similarly aware of the fact it patently isn't true. You're constantly finding yourself thinking 'yeah, yeah, well f**king done,' every twenty seconds or however long a track decides it should last, and because of that it can never, ever be a pleasurable listening experience. But, as I said, it is something that genuinely deserves a listen. Because a) I want you to suffer as well; b) there's a warped genius in there somewhere; and, c) it's just a bit of fun, and I'm pretty sure we're missing something if we ignore that.
Artists in this article: Kid Carpet
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