What does Comic Sans sound like? What does it feel like? And is it actually kinda good? These were the questions ever-present in the minds of early PC Music acts like Kero Kero Bonito’s Gus Bonito, who, to this day, performs DJ sets in front of a strobing projection of his moniker Kane West in the notorious font. Inspired by the simultaneous appeals and absurdities of corporate advertising, the label’s early releases carved out a new form of sincere artistic expression in equal embrace and distaste toward Western consumer culture, what Sasha Geffen called “inverted consumerism.” Bonito observed a similar phenomenon occurring within underground dance music, and he designed his work as Kane West around an “adoration and frustration” with the culture.
Kane West’s debut mini-album western beats—reissued on vinyl, CD, and major streaming platforms after 12 years as a download-and-SoundCloud exclusive—provides some answers to those first questions: Comic Sans feels like the hollow plastic of $50 Walmart keyboards; it sounds like the naked MIDI instruments inside them. And it might actually be good, but in a way that only a great pastiche can be good. Through seven MIDI-fied house tracks that harness both the allure and vapidness of Western consumerism, Bonito channels these themes with songs that sound like the broken plastic toys packaged in an “underground dance music”-themed Happy Meal.
Stylistically, western beats is 100% Chicago house in all its variations. The percussion motifs of a great Frankie Knuckles cut; the catchy stuttering vocal samples; grooving basslines; it’s all here. But the soulful textures of these classic grooves are exchanged for production that sounds like a marketing executive’s idea of “the beat of the music in the street.” Fittingly, this phrase is repeated to death on “power of social media,” which sanitizes the acid from a TB-303 riff and replaces it with some blanket bleeps and bloops over untreated bongos and hi-hats. Insipid as this might sound, Bonito approaches MIDI arrangements with grace as each groove gets weirder by the minute. These tracks spiral into bizarre refrains that MIDI instruments rarely traverse, like the brashly layered horns and melodically bending flutes of “gameset” and the off-kilter synth tones toward the end of “pr.”
The best classic house songs soar with impassioned vocal leads. So of course Bonito attempts to employ his own. But his approach seems like it involves searching Craigslist for a “female house vocalist” and hiring the first one to respond. The unnamed woman featured on “baby how could we be wrong” sings the one-line hook like she only showed up for the paycheck—which she probably did—but even this ambiguous lyric is more coherent than the gibberish on “preview” (which we actually get to see written out via the reissue’s liner notes: “Oee oee oee oee”, “Pitasa pitasa pitasa,” etc.). Bonito toys with this phoned-in nonsense, looping the vocals to death, dramatically changing the pitches every few measures, and placing them off-beat as he searches for the soul in voices that couldn’t sound more soulless.
These subtle subversions of house build the album’s character, but Bonito is at his best when he taps directly into the consumerist chaos at play. In “good price,” KKB bandmate Sarah Bonito steps in more as a saleswoman than a vocalist: She implores us to take advantage of deals on “plastic items” like shower curtains and “funny inflatables” with the type of faux-enthusiasm you’d get a decade later from AI chatbots. Everything reaches a glorious fever pitch on “goin crazy,” where our Craigslist vocalist screams the title 14 times uninterrupted before the song erupts in a grand finale of pounding snares and synths, as though this corporate MIDI factory is exploding due to overcapacity.
The reissue features a pair of great new remixes, one transcending the corporate madness and the other peering deep inside its dark core. Chicago house legend Joe Smooth injects actual underground soul into “power.” With the dense instrumental texture and melodic variation he brought to house staples like 1988’s “Promised Land,” he places the original song in a parallel universe where MIDI never existed. Conversely, the anonymous John Stage presents a frighteningly sparse version of “baby” with foreboding minor key strings and out-of-sync/out-of-tune piano keys as the original beat unravels in the background. Stage’s version translates the already uneasy feelings of hearing acid house reduced to happy-go-lucky plastic into something out of an actual acid trip.
Like most early PC releases, western beats’ capitalistic subversions, novel for their time, bear a fascinating legacy. Despite how recent nostalgic trends exhibit an expressly unironic embrace of optimistic advertising, the album’s Comic Sans cover alone will likely remind you of its lime green/Arial Narrow spiritual successor Brat, an album produced by Bonito’s contemporaries and marketed with a similar tongue-in-cheek simplicity to challenge—and tap into—an overwhelming social media landscape. All this time later, western beats still sounds like an imperative to turn the plastic knife of consumerism back at the ones who wield it.
