“For Halloween“
from the album Come Into My House
2008
iTunes
Irony, detachment, self-awareness — all pretty typical traits of (usually white) indie-rock types toying with hiphop, electro, or R&B, but tricky ones to pull off. At best, as with Hot Chip‘s Coming on Strong, these emotional stances can provide lyrical grist and some good punch lines. At worst, such distance can come off as condescending or minstrely, the sense of cultural otherness — whether guilty or transgressively thrilling — eclipsing the actual music.
Which is why No Kids’ Come Into My House is so refreshing. The Canadian trio of Julia Chirka, Justin Kellam, and Nick Krgovich (three-fourths of the critically lauded P:ano) touch on cooled-down, robotic R&B, but they approach such sounds as just another source on their sonic palette, with no hand-wringing about appropriation, only sincere investment. They sample from Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis as casually as they might from Jan & Dean; the band’s odd, baroque pop suggests the symphonic ambitions of Sufjan Stevens and the nu–Arthur Russellisms of Kelley Polar as much as they do the aloof drum-machine funk of early Hot Chip.
T-Pain-esque Auto-Tune and a faint echo of Renee Scroggins’s eerie “UFO” guitar appear on the chorus of the sighing “Listen for It/Courtyard Music.” “The Puddle” is a lilting, palpitating hybrid of show tune and soul. There are shades of new jack on “The Beaches All Closed,” while “For Halloween” is slightly screwed chamber pop. Everything is fair game, and everything is fully absorbed into No Kids’ peculiar, rarefied, but ultimately persuasive musical vision.
Central to that vision is the setting of a vacant or dormant house, some chilly beachfront property only occasionally inhabited, a getaway built for Great Gatsby–style leisure-class ennui. This place is especially prevalent on dour opener “Great Escape” and the swooning, subtropical “Old Iron Gate.” If any distance is acknowledged here, it’s the longing gap between these songs’ singers and their subjects.
No Kids’ eclecticism sticks because the songwriting is smart, subtle, and full of careful details; their singing is up to the task as well, their voices clean and clear — when that Auto-Tune appears, it’s remarkable because, unlike with T-Pain, here the technique tints voices that you know are capable of the melody without technologic aid (see the agile melisma on “Neighbour’s Party”). Come Into My House is a studied synthesis of forms, a sweetly sad song cycle about loneliness and domesticity, and a totally singular pop record.