Kap Bambino Blacklist
Although Kap Bambino‘s reputation as a shit-hot live act is well established, Blacklist, the Bordeaux […]
Although Kap Bambino‘s reputation as a shit-hot live act is well established, Blacklist, the Bordeaux duo’s third album, doesn’t quite capture the group’s on-stage magic. In the club, Orion Bouvier’s beefy, fuzzed-out electro provides the perfect soundtrack to Caroline Martial’s wild yelps and stage-diving antics, a dynamic successfully captured on some of this album’s noisier numbers (“Red Sign,” “Acid Eyes,” “Blacklist”) when the band cranks the mayhem to 11 and sounds something like Missing Persons gone digital hardcore. But Blacklist suffers from heavy-handed (over)production and too often wades into more overt pop territory (“Dead Lazers,” “Rezozero”), effectively neutering the band’s punky spark and resulting in run-of-the-mill, nth-generation new wave.