Pool Kids

Album Review

Aug 3

Self-Titled

The Kids are alright: Pool Kids’ sophomore release is a lesson in simplicity through complexity.

Marilyn Monroe was an iconic Hollywood beauty. Her on-screen personae, more often than not, typified the “blonde bombshell/bimbo” archetype that would become a silver screen staple for years to come.

Apocryphally, she also had an abnormally high I.Q. and was quite business savvy to boot, proving the old adage that you can’t necessarily judge a book by its cover. The same could easily be said about the Pool Kids’ self-titled 2022 release.

Pool Kids, the follow-up to 2018’s Music to Practice Safe Sex To, is a brilliant album in that there is no dull moment from start to finish. The entire collection of songs is imbued with a pervasive, aural exquisiteness that comes across irrespective of each individual track’s vibe.

However, in the tradition of fine Swiss watchmaking, this beauty does not come without a great deal of precision moving parts.

Stellar guitar heroics from Andy Anaya and Christine Goodwyne, thoughtful, engaging basslines courtesy of Nicolette Alvarez, and the superb prog-inflected technical drumming of Caden Clinton all combine seamlessly, each ultimately serving the song without detracting from the obvious virtuosity of the musicians involved.

This is not a band afraid to take musical chances, to say the least.

The track “Almost Always Better (Almost Always Worse)” is a prime example of this. Initially driven by a gorgeously atonal guitar figure, the song proceeds to spin and lurch through at least three vastly different musical sections with the uninhibited spirit of a teenager learning to drive stick.

Ms. Goodwyne’s accompanying vocals also manage to veer from syrupy sweetness to full-on Amanda Palmer-esque snarl while visiting several points in between.

The impressive lyrical content of the album broadly addresses the concept of “Adulting,” especially as it pertains to relationships in this modern world.

From the pair bonding demise of “Conscious Uncoupling” to the struggle between feeling uncomfortably connected and feeling blissfully alone in “Arm’s Length,” where the singer confesses, “I’m in a group chat, with twenty-one goddamned people. I wish I was exaggerating, but I’m not. My phone crashes thirty-seven times a day”.

While this may seem to some like an odd complaint, generationally speaking, anyone born after 1990 does not fully know a world without a technology-enabled intimate, 24/7 connection. Those born before that period often fail to realize how the onslaught of such continuous engagement can be an Atlas-worthy burden.

As a whole, this record is the sound of a band maturing. The addition of Andy Anaya and Nicolette Alvarez to the core members, Christine Goodwyne and Caden Clinton, expanded the group’s sonic palette exponentially.

The band also expresses a more adventurous musical and lyrical vocabulary than on their debut, Music to Practice Safe Sex To, with the material being more confident in its originality.

The result of this philosophy of leaning into their strengths was the group’s ability to fan the Dresden Dolls-infused sparks present on that first release into a raging inferno of intelligent, modern, relevant music on Pool Kids, in a musical landscape where today’s chart toppers are lucky to hit two out of three.

To be honest, there is not a bad song on this entire record. In a just society, Pool Kids would be impressively famous and mentioned in the same sentence as Twenty-One Pilots or Imagine Dragons. That sentence would, of course, be “I can’t believe how much better Pool Kids are than Twenty-One Pilots and Imagine Dragons.”

As it is, this release should definitely make it onto our “Top Albums of 2022” list and at least a handful of other musical cognoscenti.

You should do yourself a favor and be one of them.