Kid Loco
Jesus Life for Children Under 12 Inches
Known as Jean-Yves Prieur to his parents, Kid Loco is essentially a remix artist. However, rather than just setting popular tunes to frenetic techno beats (a practice I cannot stand), Kid Loco is one of those artists that take a track and completely rework it from the bottom up, more like a cover artist than a mere remixer. Jesus Life is an album that came out in 1999, and the vibe here is pretty much all downtempo chillout. I will say here, that I bought this album based on one song. You see, I was rooting around the megastore in Vancouver and was immediately struck by the, uh, interesting cover. I flipped it over and saw there was a remix of Mogwai's Tracy. That fact alone, and a reasonable price convinced me to purchase the album unheard. I'm just impulsive like that sometimes, In fact, I've bought albums solely based on the cover art, a practice that has both rewarded and burnt me!
Back to the Kid: So I had actually only heard of two of the artists getting worked over here, and one of them (Pulp) I am not even really a fan of. This album, happily, turned out to be a great buy. It starts with my least favorite track, The Viaduct by The Pastels. The music is nice enough, but as soon as the vocals start I have to change the track. They are just so, and understand I'm trying to be diplomatic here, childlike. Anyway, moving on we are greeted by five fantastic chillout tracks in a row, all by artists I had not heard of, and have thusfar been unable to track down the originals. My favorites in this block are Traveller by Tavin Singh and Les Réprouvés by Tommy Hools. These are both very cool tracks.
Up next is the Pulp track, which even in remix does little for me, and two more tracks from unkown artists Gak Sato and Badmarsh + Shri, which are nice enough. Now comes the track I bought the album for. Whilst instantly recognizable, Tracy is still nothing like the original. Here it is presented as an eight and a half minute epic that I daresay exceeds the original, which is the holy grail of the remix track. Big beats, which are absent in the original and a spiralling synth line really bring this track together.
Now we come to a track called Youpi (Yahoo! en francais) by Cornu. Now I don't know who Cornu is, and I don't know how much Kid Loco had to do with the sound of this track, but this is my favorite on the album by far. It begins with nice chill beats and a smooth piano line, now enter some sultry french female vocals. This is just an incredible if not bizarre track, and in my opinion is worth the price of admission alone. I have no idea what she is singing, but it is just so hopefull and infectious I cannot help to start grinning like an idiot when I hear it: Youpi, yeah! indeed.
So I really know nothing about Kid Loco, I know very few of the bands he has remixed here, but still I recommend this album to any fans of trip-hop inspired downtempo. This is really a great album that came to me from out of nowhere.
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This page, and all pages on this site were created and are maintained by Darren Kirby using valid XHTML 1.0 and CSS, and are ©copyright 2002 - 2008. The Penguin image was created by Tukka, and is used by permission. Inspiration for the look of this site was provided by Eric A. Meyer's CSS gallery. This website runs on Gentoo Linux. It is served by Apache. PHP and MySQL hold together the backend.