After years of indie kids presuming to shake digital ass, the electronic empire has struck back. Popped from the womb short and fuzzy like a Weekly World News monkey baby, the Beautiful New Born Children traffic in garage-punk so red-line retro you can almost hear an NME drop (or is that just tinnitus?). They also happen to be fronted by Michael Beckett, German-based laptopper behind solo project Kpt.Michi.Gan as well as guitarist for electronic outfit Schneider TM. Jimmy Tamborello's gonna be so pissed.
Beckett's shift in direction shouldn't come as a complete shock. Guitars were welcome interlopers on Kpt.Michi.Gan's eponymous 2004 effort, which also featured a crunching, vocoded version of the new album's title track. Hey People!, though, is a different creature, blazing through nine sloppy tracks of Libertines sneers, bouncy Strokes rhythms and painstaking haphazardness in about 23 minutes. Beckett is accompanied by wife Kirsten and two friends, all playing instruments other than their own-- to heighten the verisimilitude? Still, squalls of noise and krautrock drone periodically confirm this wasn't recorded in an actual 1960s or '70s garage.
Lo-fi veneer aside, Beckett's songs could plausibly receive the same seven-word description as an Art Brut masterpiece-- funny lyrics shouted over basic rock riffage-- but here that's as meh as it sounds. "I would like to show them how to boogie down," he shouts on the album's most cohesive song, "Paper Mills". Opener "Do the Do" bops around quoting "Heart-Shaped Box". The laffs soon shrink, relying on amphetamine and chemical-imbalance jokes as the lyrics become indecipherably distorted. It doesn't help that each two-minute power-chord blast is roughly interchangeable with the next. "Hey People!" adds acoustic guitar, but not enough to alter the basic texture. Only closer "Up and Down and Round and Round" breaks the formula, blitzkrieging a single chord an extra five minutes or so.
For whatever reason, the Beautiful New Born Children's handlers have tried to shroud their identity in mystery. Hey newness rings registers, but maybe Pollyanna the band just wants to be judged on its own merits. OK then: Hey People! isn't bad for a quick spastic freakout, though early comparisons to fast-dumb-loud savants like the Stooges and the MC5 are laughably overstated. The Children infuse their excitable, years-late revivalism with more explosions and less heart than similarly styled technological primitives the Exploding Hearts. In 2004 novel The Confessions of Max Tivoli, Andrew Sean Greer's backward-aging protagonist is born a wrinkled geezer. I'm just saying.
