Cool Kids :: The Bake Sale E.P.

There's something about summer and hip hop that goes together like chocolate and peanut butter, or, perhaps more appropriately, gin and juice. I have heaps of "summer" playlists in my iTunes library -- well, if not heaps, at least one each year for the past five years -- and all of them are heavy on the hip hop. Something about the sun just makes me want to turn up the bass and roll down the windows, so a new discovery is always a welcome addition to my sunny weather collection.

Recently on a whim I picked up The Bake Sale E.P. by Cool Kids, and was thrilled with what I found. Cool Kids deliver slick and spare "Goin' Back To Cali" era L.L. Cool J style beats with a modern and wry sensibility. They rap about shoes and BMX bikes, and are almost impossibly referential; the song "88", for instance, manages to riff on Missy Elliott, channel Jay-Z from Beyonce's "Crazy In Love", and then segue directly into "The Safety Dance". Genius.

You're easily grabbed (as you should be) by the first track, "What Up Man" with the repetitive "tick tick tick tick ticka tick tick" making way for the flow that follows. The E.P. continues in the same vein through the remaining nine tracks, and the sound overall is busily simple; harkening back to a time when hip hop was fun and it was all about the beats. It's heavily recommended that you pick this one up before the nights get too long and you feel the urge to turn on some Elliott Smith and pull the covers up.