As an underdog victory story and an exemplar of alt-rap aesthetics, the Kids soundtrack has long stood as the ultimate mid-’90s time capsule—a fate reinforced in recent years by its spotty availability on streaming services. In its original incarnation, the Kids soundtrack resembled a Barlow-curated mixtape, with various Folk Implosion pieces complemented by songs from Daniel Johnston, Slint, and Sebadoh. The album’s release through Polygram subsidiary London Records made it the first major-label-affiliated product on Barlow’s CV, though the Folk Implosion never signed to London directly. In the ’90s this was a coup: They could benefit from a big label’s promotional muscle without being under its thumb. In the streaming era, however, old soundtracks featuring various artists affiliated with multiple labels face a complicated path to our listening queues (and those that make it often appear with key tracks grayed out due to digital-rights issues). Kids’ fragmented history on DSPs—with different partial permutations of the record available on different services and in different regions, if at all—has diminished the commercial high-water mark of Barlow’s career into a faded, did-that-actually-happen memory.
Music for KIDS rights that wrong, by filling the hole in the Folk Implosion’s digital catalog and clearing the way for the long-overdue addition of “Natural One” to your Essential ’90s Alternative playlist. But this is not a reissue of the original soundtrack album; rather, it’s a collection of all the music that Folk Implosion created in this period, including tracks heard in the film, stuff that got left on the cutting-room floor, songs that would find their proper home on later releases, and a couple of alternate versions that uncork the material’s latent club-hopping potential. (Few words so expediently transport you to a specific time and place like remix credits for UNKLE and Dust Brothers.) Taken as a whole, Music for KIDS is less a totem to Clark/Korine’s cult flick than an illuminating glimpse into the evolution of Barlow’s very own proto-Postal Service—a beat-driven side project that, for a brief moment, outshone his main gig.
At the very least, this collection reaffirms that Folk Implosion deserved to be a two-hit wonder. “Nothing Gonna Stop” takes the “Natural One” template and jacks up the pulse: Davis’ drums lock into a sampled Silver Apples bass loop to forge the missing link between those ’60s hypno-psych innovators and the after-midnight breaks of DJ Shadow, providing a relentless, pulsating counterpoint to Barlow’s slackadasical rap-speak. By comparison, the incidental instrumentals lack the same sense of frisson, either ending too soon (the strung-out psychedelia of “Jenny’s Theme”) or going on too long (the bongo-powered, synth-blitzed jam “Nasa Theme”). But by liberating these recordings from ’90s purgatory, Music for KIDS highlights their uncanny prescience: The stark, stalking “Crash” points the way to a post-rock future, while the collection’s other Silver Apples tribute, “Simean Groove,” feels like a blueprint for the sort of wiggy, percussive workouts that Caribou would master years later.
