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Artists Of The Year
CMU Albums Of The Year 2009: 80kidz – This Is My Shit
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 17 December 2009
As we head towards the end of the year, we’ll be revealing, in no particular order, our ten favourite albums of 2009. Today, 80kidz – ‘This Is My Shit’.
Formed in Tokyo in 2007, 80kidz’s Jun, Ali& and Mayu originally came together as DJs, but really started turning heads, including ours, when they began tweaking records for a series of increasingly impressive remixes. Original music soon followed, and their debut album, ‘This Is My Shit’, arrived this year. In the UK, it was only soft released on iTunes through the band’s own Kidz Rec label, meaning the album largely went unnoticed, though has received a boost after their track, ‘Miss Mars’, was featured on a Kitsuné Maison compilation earlier this year.
From the moment the synth riff on the opening track, ‘Go Mynci’, kicks in, it’s apparent that ‘This Is My Shit’ is not going to be just another run-of-the-mill electronic album. The riff is too good to be a fluke, and the band follow it up with plenty more across sixteen tracks, making it one of the few albums of such length released this year that isn’t bulked out with unnecessary filler tracks.
Although the trio themselves are an instrumental outfit, they do draft in vocals from autoKratz, Ghostape, Hey Champ and The Shoes, drawing them more towards a pure pop sound. On ‘She’, in particular, autoKratz frontman David Cox offers a soft vocal that works wonderfully at odds with 80kidz’s upbeat, synth-heavy sound, and makes the sudden burst of the previously mentioned ‘Miss Mars’, which follows it, all the more effective.
With music that is endlessly energetic and exciting, I really hope that 2010 will bring 80kidz, now a duo following the recent departure of Mayu, to a much wider attention. They truly deserve it.
Buy from iTunes