What does Comic Sans sound like? What does it feel like? And is it actually kinda good? These were the questions ever-present in the minds of early PC Music acts like Kero Kero Bonito’s Gus Bonito, who, to this day, performs DJ sets in front of a strobing projection of his moniker Kane West in the notorious font. Inspired by the simultaneous appeals and absurdities of corporate advertising, the label’s early releases carved out a new form of sincere artistic expression in equal embrace and distaste toward Western consumer culture, what Sasha Geffen called “inverted consumerism.” Bonito observed a similar phenomenon occurring within underground dance music, and he designed his work as Kane West around an “adoration and frustration” with the culture.
Kane West’s debut mini-album western beats—reissued on vinyl, CD, and major streaming platforms after 12 years as a download-and-SoundCloud exclusive—provides some answers to those first questions: Comic Sans feels like the hollow plastic of $50 Walmart keyboards; it sounds like the naked MIDI instruments inside them. And it might actually be good, but in a way that only a great pastiche can be good. Through seven MIDI-fied house tracks that harness both the allure and vapidness of Western consumerism, Bonito channels these themes with songs that sound like the broken plastic toys packaged in an “underground dance music”-themed Happy Meal.
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Stylistically, western beats is 100% Chicago house in all its variations. The percussion motifs of a great Frankie Knuckles cut; the catchy stuttering vocal samples; grooving basslines; it’s all here. But the soulful textures of these classic grooves are exchanged for production that sounds like a marketing executive’s idea of “the beat of the music in the street.” Fittingly, this phrase is repeated to death on “power of social media,” which sanitizes the acid from a TB-303 riff and replaces it with some blanket bleeps and bloops over untreated bongos and hi-hats. Insipid as this might sound, Bonito approaches MIDI arrangements with grace as each groove gets weirder by the minute. These tracks spiral into bizarre refrains that MIDI instruments rarely traverse, like the brashly layered horns and melodically bending flutes of “gameset” and the off-kilter synth tones toward the end of “pr.”
The best classic house songs soar with impassioned vocal leads. So of course Bonito attempts to employ his own. But his approach seems like it involves searching Craigslist for a “female house vocalist” and hiring the first one to respond. The unnamed woman featured on “baby how could we be wrong” sings the one-line hook like she only showed up for the paycheck—which she probably did—but even this ambiguous lyric is more coherent than the gibberish on “preview” (which we actually get to see written out via the reissue’s liner notes: “Oee oee oee oee”, “Pitasa pitasa pitasa,” etc.). Bonito toys with this phoned-in nonsense, looping the vocals to death, dramatically changing the pitches every few measures, and placing them off-beat as he searches for the soul in voices that couldn’t sound more soulless.
