Starting off as a spazzy post-adolescent beatmaker, Miguel De Pedro, aka
Kid606, built his house on frenzied breakcore, gnarled mash-ups, and a petulant flippancy toward all the unwritten rules and codes of the electronic music scene.
Lost in the Game comes more than ten years into
Kid606 testing the boundaries of his craft, and in that time, a lot of the innovations he helped push earlier on have been widely accepted in the ever-shifting electronic music conversation. Having seen glitchy beats and disintegrating electronics to a level of astronomically psychedelic deconstruction, it figures that
Kid606's evolution would branch out with radically different approaches as time went on, and
Lost in the Game sees him embracing melody and straightforwardness almost more than ever. An acerbic sense of humor is still very much alive here, if mostly in the form of ridiculous song titles like "Meeguk So Horny," "Godspeed You African American Emperor," and the like, but the songs themselves are more serious and sometimes even somber affairs. Cinematic songs like "Gimme Summer" and "Step Into the Light You Fucking Idiot" blend melancholic synth and buzzing layers of organ tones with understated, midtempo beats. The mood is dark, searching, and almost pensive throughout the album.
Lost in the Game could represent
Kid606's "I'm an adult now" statement, with the bratty fun that saturated earlier works replaced with moody synth stabs and contemplative chord progressions. The title "Night Club vs. Book Club" and the song's solitary late-night vibe sum up the feeling of being past a certain point in your life and moving on to different pursuits. It's good to see De Pedro continuing forward, and certainly this won't be the last shift of style or concept for the
Kid606 project. ~ Fred Thomas