Black Kids probably should not be as good as they are. For a start, a band called "Black Kids" that contains more than one pasty white kid is a poor start, and their actual musical material, borrowing liberally from 80s synth pop, early 90s electronica and 60s guitar pop should, by my calculations, lead to a cheesy, cringeworthy mess that is only listened to by friends of fashion designers, people who like The Ting Tings and all six people who think that the 1980s were cool in a non-ironic way.

However, as you probably gathered, Black Kids are good. Surprisingly good, in fact. This is probably because while the band wear their dated and rather daggy influence on their collective sleeves, they never forget to include substance in their songs as well as style. Each track here is a tribute to bygone decades, but at their hearts they're still well constructed and catchy songs, which means that "Partie Traumatic" does far better than most other albums of this type.

When I talk about substance in songs, I'm of course talking about the really catchy choruses that the band manage to sandwich into practically every track here. I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You for instance has an absolute monster of a chorus, bookended by exuberant counting at the start, and a similarly shouty refrain of "Dance! Dance! Dance! Dance!" at the end. The last half of the song is practically just the chorus over and over again, and given its silly, yet infectious and fun nature, that was probably a good songwriting move to make.

That said, not all of the songwriting manages to hit this mark. The opening track in particular kicks off with a particularly awful knock-knock joke that would almost be enough to sink this album before it starts, if it wasn't for the fact that everyone is going to fast forward straight to the radio hits the first time they listen to this album. Vocalist Reggie Youngblood's delivery is also scarily close to the vocal stylings of The Cure's Robert Smith, and while this is usually a good thing in the context of the album, in cases where the songwriting starts to wear a little thin (such as on Love Me Already), it makes the music sound a little like a throwaway track from "Japanese Whispers", which is probably not somewhere that the band want to go.

But the occasional flat track aside, "Partie Traumatic" is a great little debut album, that almost lives up to the massive amounts of hype that the blogosphere has whipped up over them. Closing track Look At Me (When I Rock Wichoo) is a particularly good example of where the band's strengths lie, combining a supremely danceable beat, sassy and cool female rapping, and retro-sounding guitar licks into a four minute package that's as effective in the club as it is sitting at home. It's this whole album in microcosm; it shouldn't work, but it does.