From the project name to the album title to the beautiful hair framing Adam Bainbridge's face on the cover to the competently percolating grooves, everything about Kindness' World, You Need a Change of Mind goes down easy. The UK-born singer-songwriter has a real feel for idiom. He can do washed-out new wave, strobing disco, atmospheric balladry. He'll throw in a sax break and the odd cover. In one way, Kindness represents the end-point of the chilled aesthetic that tints our memories of the summer of 2009 until they have the look of an Instagram photo. Where much of that music was homemade and owed a lot to Ariel Pink, Bainbridge's Kindness gives that "songwriting as mixtape" approach a professional sheen. With production from Philippe Zdar of French dance outfit Cassius, it's all rendered just so, every element placed where it should be.
That might sound like a faint praise, but the truth is it's hard to get music to sound like this. Back when Bainbridge's musical heroes (Nile Rodgers, Jam & Lewis, Cerrone) were at the peak of their game, the industry generated a lot of revenue and a lot of that went back into studios. People knew how to craft records that sounded good, and they had the tools to make it happen. So the fact that Bainbridge's scratchy lite-funk guitars, rubbery bass, and layered, reverb-saturated vocals are all in their right proportions bears note. When World, You Need a Change of Mind is playing, it's unlikely to make anyone who doesn't spend all their waking hours tracking blog trends mad. So on that level, purely as an audio object, World is a success. It can fill up a room and turn it into a cool and friendly place (those choosing music for the sales floor of your hip local retailer are sure to notice these qualities).
Like a lot of young producers in the electro-pop sphere, Bainbridge started out recording covers of songs by favorite artists in order to figure out how it was done. But his songwriting progression since then hasn't kept pace with his technical know-how, and this set runs into trouble when considered outside of pure style. It's telling that the two most memorable melodies on World come from other writers, and oddly, the chosen covers have something to bother people on both sides of the Atlantic. "Anyone Can Fall in Love" is a 1986 UK hit by actress Anita Dobson, and it was the theme song to the show she starred in, "EastEnders". While I have no associations with "Anyone Can Fall in Love", as heard here it comes over as pretty but ultimately cloying and silly, an unearned stab at at soul-driven tenderness.
The other cover is of the Replacements' "Swingin' Party", a song for which I do have a lot of associations. The Kindness version is lovely in its way, with delicate production and loads of atmosphere, but it basically strips the song of its meaning and leaves only an ethereal, vibe-laden shell. "If being afraid is a crime, we hang side by side" is a line of desperation, the kind of thing that made Paul Westerberg such a distinctive voice. But with Bainbridge, you feel like he has the world on a string. There's no vulnerability. His version is "sad," I guess, but almost anything sung with his layered, ghosted-out vocals would be. You don't get a sense of his personality, what he brings to it.
Bainbridge's original material is not quite as tuneful but it does possess a consistency of vision. The appealing "Cyan" sounds like Arthur Russell collaborating with Toro Y Moi, and it finds just the right mix of dreaminess and propulsion. "Seod" has an appealingly thick blend of vintage synths and ping-ponging percussion. And "That's Alright" is the set's one true curveball, zeroing in on that late-1980s moment when Prince and Jam & Lewis were using the gated snare to inflate pop to absurd proportions. Forget that it lifts the vocal hook from Escort's "All Through the Night" and is essentially a genre exercise, and it's easy to wallow in just how well it's all done. "That's Alright" also sounds oddly fresh at this moment, one of the few places where Bainbridge makes a choice that doesn't feel obvious. And that's ultimately the issue with this record. World, You Need a Change of Mind certainly isn't a bad album, and the technical execution is first-rate. Its failure is ultimately one of ambition. This is music to be enjoyed while doing something else, not something you fall in love with.
