Album review: Cool Kids, ‘When Fish Ride Bicycles’

Reed and Ingersoll flip clever rhymes that pay homage to vintage cars (“Rush Hour Traffic,” “GMC”); smooth-talking radio DJs (“Boomin’ “); pre-Lebron-era hoops and fashion (“Penny Hardaway”); Chicago winters (“Bundle Up”); Chicago summers (“Get Right,” “Summer Jam”); and girls, girls, girls. The MCs never get particularly excited, keeping a cool reserve that requires listeners to meet them halfway. Ingersoll, who handles most of the production, favors midtempo beats and terse keyboard riffs, modest almost to a fault. A few guests (Bun B, Mayer Hawthorne, Travis Barker, Asher Roth) expand the sound slightly and beef up the hooks without resorting to gimmickry, though the Neptunes-produced “Get Right” could pass for an outtake from Pharrell Williams’ N.E.R.D. It makes for a solid if unremarkable follow-up, the kind of release that buys a little more time for the Cool Kids to live up to their original promise.

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