Lyle sings (and in the closer, an LA-based children’s choir repeats): “Kids are sad/The sky is blue/There are monsters in the spare bedroom/Kids grow up and move away/They closed the plant and the mall arcade/Kids are sad/Their parents, too/Kids get high in the spare bedroom/We grow up and move away/The seasons pass but the monsters stay.” On title cut “Kids,” both the prelude version, which follows “Wave,” and the reprise version, which closes out the album, Lyle strikes even deeper at the complicated undercurrent of nostalgia, even as McEwan unleashes the sweetest blend of nostalgic synth-pop.
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We’ve forgotten how to be the kids at the mall. We eat, date, and have fun all through apps and avatars. We’re more comfortable chatting on social media with people, whose names are probably not even real half the time. He’s setting the stage for our modern times. On “Wave,” Lyle follows up that opening line with words about people wanting to be close and intimate, but not so close as to actually know anything about each other. Lyle is too gifted a lyricist to ever peddle one-dimensional nostalgia and his bandmate Tim McEwan is too talented to match that with paint-by-numbers synthery. The phrase sets the stage for a nuanced, mature, and certainly complicated type of nostalgia that pervades the album.
Those are the first words Tyler Lyle sings on Kids, in the song “Wave,” following an intro interlude track called “Youth” that features sweet synths and sampled pieces from news reports in the early 1980s discussing the then-growing personal computer phenomenon. The world was still dissolving back then, but at least we had our youth. To me, this wistfulness is where Kids lives. The world seems worse than ever now and we lament the hell out of all of this. What teenager really would?Īnd we look back on that now and we are still filled with such grand nostalgia for “simpler times,” when we didn’t have to worry about all of the dumpster fires of 2018 we can’t possibly extinguish. You were probably quite aware of the challenges at hand, but didn’t really think too much about it. Say you’re a bit older - maybe you’re in your mid-40s now and distinctly remember how awesome it was to be a teenager at the mall in the ’80s. We didn’t know about the grander world around us: the rampant consumerism the cratering towns and dying American Dream as industry after industry left for cheaper pastures the plague of HIV and AIDS that President Reagan and his team didn’t take seriously the drastically diminishing power of labor in the face of the Gordon Gekkos of the world the threat of nuclear war with the USSR diminished representation in government and media for women and people of color, etc., etc. There were the crushes who crushed on others, thereby crushing you. We’d be at “war” with other “tribes” in the neighborhood, sometimes resulting in bruises and more. My friends and I would all go off exploring the neighborhood without supervision for hours at a time. I wasn’t a teen in the ’80s, but I did live through them and did find myself with friends and family at the mall oh-so-often in the ’80s and early ’90s. Song titles like “Youth,” “Kids,” “Explorers,” “Saturday Mornings,” and “Arcade Dreams,” all evoke fond memories. You can’t go back to the mall, because it’s probably torn down.
Even the fondest, happiest memories are tinged with the sometimes crushing realization that you can never go back. Like the phrase, this record recognizes that nostalgia is bathed in wistfulness - even sadness. This is a nostalgic record, to be sure, but let’s not forget The Midnight’s mantra: “mono no aware,” a Japanese phrase that refers to sad beauty of seeing time pass you by. The Midnight would never patronize you with such a simple sentiment. The Midnight’s new album, Kids, is a fascinating and well-executed work of art, drenched in colorful synths, upbeat rhythms, and evocative lyrics seemingly about a simpler time when the malls were vibrant with kids hanging out and playing video games and getting crushes and engaging in all sorts of lovely tomfoolery.īut don’t be fooled by that first blush assessment, though.
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