The angriest you’ll see Brad all year, perhaps…
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[4.62]
Brad Shoup: I know that when the KISS-FM DJs give me bullshit biographical info before playing a song, it’s a bald shill. It happened with the Madden Brothers, it happened with Katy Tiz (whose cover of Rock Mafia’s “The Big Bang” is stuck at #100, two slots worse than the original’s peak), and it’s happening with Echosmith, who make garbage music about garbage sentiments, the kind of sentiments that only Taylor Swift seems to get away with. And that’s because Taylor Swift is a pop-emo icon, horcruxing herself into every stormy night and pair of glasses and probably those Diet Coke bottles in the commercials. Also, her narratives tend to resolve. I think the takeaway from their repeating “cool kids” literally two dozen times is that these dummies don’t know they’re beauti-cool, what with their arrhythmia and their unsteady gait and their existence as a pop band made of siblings. This is pre-movie-trailer music: baleful and tuneless, ingratiating and structurally flat. Cool was never in their reach. They need to focus on not being embarrassing.
[0]
Katherine St Asaph: The Radio Disney/Clear Channel thresher, as threshers do, produces a lot of chaff, but it also produces acts like Echosmith. “Cool Kids” is the Saving Jane to Taylor Swift: gawkier, with patchier makeup, breathy-dreamy in a way that suggests “Echosmith” isn’t just usual band-name nonsense but a sonic statement, and relatable outside invented high schools. Adults don’t stop wishing they’re the cool kids; if anything they wish harder, because the stakes are higher: not prom but promotions at work, or work at all, or nights not alone, or playdates for their own kids. A portion of a generation will replay this wistfully at age 25 or 35 or 65, making “Cool Kids” valuable deep down.
[7]
Alfred Soto: The vocals are breathy, earnest, and androgynous, the sentiments rote: the cool kids drive the fast cars but the received sensitivity of the music — echo cool enough for Bloc Party in 2005 — gives no hint that the uncool kids could do anything in those cars besides become new cool kids, plus ça change and so on. The uncool kids need pumped up kicks in their songs.
[4]
Josh Love: The alienation felt by the uncool kids is never tempered at all, yet everything else is shimmery and nonchalant. Hayley Williams and Taylor Swift have so capably conveyed the feeling of being a teenage outsider, but Echosmith’s vocalist lacks the former’s spitfire defiance or the latter’s narrative eye. If “Cool Kids” was sung in a foreign language you’d have a far easier time convincing me it was a sun-kissed celebration of being popular rather than an ode to misfits.
[3]
David Sheffieck: As sibling bands go Echosmith are no Hanson, but there’s something about this more-honest take on “Royals” that charms nonetheless. If nothing else, the semi-ironic chorus suggests that in five years or so, it’ll be a great karaoke pick for anyone who’s exiting high school at the right time to imprint on it.
[6]
Anthony Easton: The kids who were cool when you were 15 are selling insurance and live in places like Chino. The uncool kids at 16 move to the city and learn to fuck or dance or play guitar. I recommend not worrying about being cool at 15, and moving out of Chino. Unless you are being ironic, which has enough emotional distance that I would recommend moving to Silver Lake.
[6]
Will Adams: Musically, you can get the real deal (i.e. pop rock as wistful as it is groovy) from a handful of other bands, even without counting the non-sibling ones. Lyrically, you can get the real deal by stealing a seventh grader’s diary.
[4]
Megan Harrington: Listening to “Cool Kids” it’s easier than it should be to slip back into my 15-year-old brain. My younger self would have deeply resented and distrusted a song like this and its tangle of loose ends. The cool kids I knew had lives as misshapen and misfitting as any high schooler, and the kids who looked like Echosmith (or the kids who didn’t but could sing or had a garage band) were cool. But the ache of “Cool Kids” is real, and knowing that the band is formed of four siblings speaks to an isolation that can’t be disguised with a California wardrobe. They’re also competently churning out dreamy pop with a consistency that rivals bands a decade older; it’s hard not to imagine these kids tucked away in an attic practicing while their peers learned to drive to Taco Bell. Maybe Echosmith do wish for a life of seeming normalcy.
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