"I know you're ripping the packaging off your CD," Don Cannon bellows near the end of "Introduction to Ice Fishing". "If you're like me, you're reading the credits right now!" That could be a joke or a reference to Jay-Z's Vol. 3 intro, but somehow it comes out sounding like an indication of deep cluelessness, especially as rendered in Cannon's imitation-DJ-Drama blare. (Seriously, they sound exactly like each other.) Nobody's ripping the packaging off Gone Fishing because, as far as I can tell, no physical copies of the thing even exist. The Cool Kids occupy this weird only-in-2009 unexplored territory in which they don't actually have to sell or even make CDs to score Mountain Dew marketing money or soundtrack Kevin Garnett's atrocious dancing. They're an internet phenomenon, and that appears to be all they aspire to. And so Gone Fishing, a full hour of new Cool Kids music that they're offering for free download, should be a major event in the group's evolution. I guess. Maybe.
But Gone Fishing sounds like what it probably is: A collection of castoffs that weren't good enough to make When Fish Ride Bicycles, the full-length debut album that's supposedly coming at some point. The mixtape is a weird format for a group like this. Last year's The Bake Sale EP worked in part because it was short; a half-hour of their minimal, nonchalant mid-1980s revivalism is really all anyone needs to hear at any one time. Gone Fishing, by contrast, starts dragging before it's half over, the blasé fashion-talk and untroubled picking-up-chicks stories melting together into a bored-afternoon blur. The weirdly muffled and flat mastering job really hurts a group for whom crispy neck-snap snares are a principle virtue. As calm and casual as The Bake Sale was, the hooks had a sort of insistence that's altogether lacking here. And then there's Don Cannon.
Cannon is a beast of a producer and a Southern mixtape kingpin, but it's weird to hear him yelling all over a Cool Kids mixtape since his aesthetic and the Kids' are almost exact opposites. Cannon tracks like OutKast's "The Art of Storytelling, Part 4" and Young Jeezy's "Circulate" get much of their power from their soul-derived organic warmth, which is a million miles removed from the Kids' frigid empty space. He produces a number of Gone Fishing tracks in collaboration with the group's Chuck Inglish, and it's an awkward match, Cannon's shards of guitar clashing clumsily with Chuck's 808 ticks. And his constant headachy drops do immeasurable damage to a group that works best when at its most dead-flat simplistic.
But the main problem with Gone Fishing is that the songs just aren't as strong as the ones on The Bake Sale, or even the best of the various mp3 blog-bait tracks they've churned out before and after. As far as their punchlines, things never get much more clever than when they compare themselves to Launchpad and Darkwing Duck or more urgent than this: "That's why we do it this way/ And it's fluent, nothing to it, let's get games of 2K." When Ludacris and Bun B show up on "Pennies (Updated Roster Remix)", both past-their-prime Southern legends absolutely demolish the Kids on their own track without even trying. By itself, Bun's opening line ("I got a pocket full of profit and a wallet full of wonder/ A brain full of brawn and a throat that's full of thunder") has about fifty bazillion times the rewind value of anything either Kid says here.
And yet Gone Fishing is a long way from being a total loss. Even when they're on autopilot, their icy flatness has style. There is, after all, a sort of compelling chilliness to two young rappers who never give enough of a fuck to raise their voices one bit. And the beats, especially the ones done by Chuck alone, keep every last synth-wash and snare-hit in its exact right place. When it comes time to rap over other people's tracks, they don't hijack "Gucci Bandana" or "Day 'N' Nite". Instead, they make use of the Art of Noise's impressionistic synthpop masterpiece "Moments in Love", which by itself is worth the five minutes it takes to download the tape. But if they ever do get around to putting out that album, the Cool Kids will have to come up with at least a few more ideas as clever as that.
