Childhood Friends
Key Party
Independent; 2008
Remember Art in Elementary School? There were lots of crayons, finger-paints, bottles of glue, containers of glitter, scraps of material, and so much more – a cornucopia of crafty items seemingly so diverse that a good teacher could never run out of worthwhile projects to create for his/her students. But then there was the day when students where instructed to take out a piece of construction paper and then combine all of their favorite colors, textures, and sundry items onto that paper to create a collage. Sure, there were some creative pieces that arose from such an event, but more often than not, a mess was made instead. And as callous as such a metaphor might be (I mean, who would want to be compared to an Elementary Art project?!?), it seems that Childhood Friends took a similar approach to the creation of their third album, entitled Key Party. The album combines fuzzy, distorted guitar lines with dark synth lines and then places some off-kilter, often-off-key vocals atop the instrumentation. The entire project is frustrating and fractured, in that, as the band seeks to experiment voraciously and admirably with the boundaries of rock, gothic pop, and trip-hop, they fall down into an ambitious puddle of their own making. In the end, the record comes across as the result of two talented musicians who bit off far more than they could chew in terms of genre-hopping, resulting in an unflattering collage of musical elements that simply don’t sound as if they belong on the same canvas.
