ALBUMS

KID LOCO
A Grand Love Story
Yellow Production/East West

Now it is time to see who really made the French explosion '97. First up is Kid Bravo... "Produced and mixed with incomparable taste and perception by the still handsome but real stoned KID LOCO", explains the sleeve.

We arrived in Rome, Italy early one morning. In the park outside the Grand Central Station people were still at sleep with their backpacks as pillows. After close to twenty hours on the train we´re feeling a bit weary, so we placed ourselves on a bench in the park and started prepare breakfast, bread, cheese and stale water from the plastic bottle we had bought on the train.

Within five minutes there comes four or five small kids, really just kids, seven or eight years old, and they surrounds us. They come up close, holding large pieces of paper to our faces, so we have to back. Suddenly I see two younger girls trying to open the bag; we had on the ground between our feets, with passports, tickets and money. As I reached for the bag and tried to get hold of it and take it back from the girls, the older kids comes closer with the large papers to keep me from stopping the girls. We are so tired and this feels like a dream, so our movements are strangely slow and unfocused. We are screaming at the kids. Finally a man in a suit passes and notices our predicament, he yells at the kids and hits them with his briefcase, the kids turns and starts at him, but suddenly they just stop dead and starts to run away. The man slowly nods in our direction then he smiles and disappears.

We picked up our gear and leaves the park in a haste. On the street we caught a taxi. In the car, the radio was turned down low, playing a piece of music that was both soft and wild at the same time. It was actually a fitting soundtrack to the incident in the Grand Central Park our first day in the sunny and beautiful Rome. I still have no idea what that music was, but there is something in Kid Locos music on A Grand Love Story that brings back the memories of that morning and the music playing so softly in the taxi.

The album is a near perfect cinematic musical journey: soothing, haunting and uplifting.

A Grand Love Theme sets the pace, placing the album in the realms of the sophisticated and strange night life in large cities around the Mediterranean Sea, were gentle breaks for late nights are the order of the day. The single Relaxin With Cherry ups the tempo with the help of a cool bluesy guitar. As Calling Aventura King stoned groove puts the soft funkiness back, there is no turning back anymore and the music sweeps and whooshes away into a musical journey with Morricone choirs, Nino Rota and Lalo Schiffrin soundtracks, airy flutes, pianos and guitar licks.

When the albums ends, it has to be played one more time, cause there is something in the music one have to hear again and again. The music is so easy and accessible that it could have been annoying, but the overall impression is instead a distinct sense of timeless quality and beauty. This is an album you just got to have!

For interviews and more information about Kid Loco, please visit a nice site in France dedicated to Kid Loco. By the way, two interviews are in French, so the old school French might come in handy when visiting this site, the rest of the material are in English.