Ultraviolet doesn't sound like an album nearly three years in the making, but that's what it is. Chicago party-rapper Kid Sister dropped the breezy nail-salon jam "Pro Nails" in spring 2007, and the song went viral when Kanye West showed up for a superstar cameo. Kid Sister's spent the intervening years recording a debut, scratching it, starting over, tinkering, and finally coming out with the product she really wanted to release. And it's... a 40-minute, 12-track dance-rap full-length without a single hard punchline or trenchant moment, the sort of thing that sounds like it could've been banged out in a couple of weeks. Turns out this isn't the hipster-rap Detox.
Fortunately for Kid Sis, Sparks-addled party rap has not, as a genre, advanced much since "Pro Nails". A number of the tracks on Ultraviolet became blog favorites years ago, but beyond that, the album sounds about as current as it would've if she'd cranked it out in a timely manner. In fact, the record comes considerably less stuffed with ideas than, say, Spank Rock's YoYoYoYoYo or Fannypack's So Stylistic, years-old albums that covered similar stylistic ground but twisted and sputtered and wriggled as much as they could've without leaving their dancey, lightweight wheelhouses. Those albums came equipped with a restless, inventive sense of fun. Ultraviolet, for the most part, just sits there.
Production-wise, Ultraviolet is a dance album, not a rap album. The beats, from folks like XXXchange, Sinden, and boyfriend/label boss A-Trak, blow by at frantic but assured clips, picking up and then discarding little melodic ideas as they go. We hear a lot of ravey, diffuse synth stabs and compressed Ed Bangery blurts. "Big n Bad" stops just short of jacking Europe's "Final Countdown" synth riff. "Let Me Bang 2009" rests on a pretty cloud of keyboards. A few moments of hammy melody call up memories of cheesed-out 90s hi-NRG Euro-dance, stuff like Vengaboys or DJ Sammy. But the only time the album's musical palette shifts in any significant way is on "Switch Board", where Chicago juke producer DJ Gant-Man uses the same ingredients to push a more frantic, furious idea of party-rocking. When Kid Sis and Gant-Man abandon rapping entirely near the end and resort to barking out dance instructions and party-chants, it's like finally.
Kid Sister is not a great rapper, or even a good one. She spits out all her words with a nasal, scrunched-up, exaggerated pronunciation, the kind of thing that reminds me of actors in teen movies rapping for laughs. When she attempts punchlines, the results are pretty grisly: "Boy, you got a problem? Holler at Dr. Phil/ I'll put a hurting on ya and I do it in some heels." She barely stays on top of her beats, and she never switches up her cadences. Lyrically, she rarely steps far outside her favorite subject-- partying-- or even implies that much life exists beyond it. After three tracks of "yeah, let's dance", it's almost a relief to her her come with "Step", a song about flirting with an overly aggressive dude in a club-- still a song about partying, mind you, but at least a slightly new aspect of it. Kid Sis's hipster-circuit party-rap has always been a weird and barely acknowledged corner of the rap universe, but the subgenre's best rappers (Spank Rock's Naeem Juwan, for instance) radiate the same intensity that all good rappers do-- the idea that they have to keep rapping or they'll fall to pieces. Kid Sister doesn't have that.
And as she shows on Ultraviolet's best moment, she doesn't necessarily need to lean on it. My favorite song on the album is the one with no rapping whatsoever. "You Ain't Really Down" is an irresistible little piece of freestyle/electro revisionism, Kid Sis working a surprisingly nimble singing voice over a pinging, bottom-heavy track. Even though she's singing about being heartbroken, there's a fun approachability in her voice, and she multitracks in some new jack swing backing vocals that remind me of "Motownphilly" more than anything else. An album of Kid Sis singing songs like this might be worth a three-year wait. An album like this one? Not so much.
