"[I'm] struggling, really, to be honest," Reggie Youngblood said on a 102-degree day in Georgia this summer. It was between songs during Black Kids' set at Athens Popfest, and the singer/guitarist's onstage banter wasn't sounding quite as sharp as his songwriting. The guitar-jangling, Jacksonville-based five-piece were hardly "struggling" musically, though: Eyewitness raves about the performance spread faster than you can say "Technorati," and positive notices soon followed from the NME, Vice, The Guardian, and, yes, Pitchfork. All this for a band with no announced label, or even much touring history.

You can download Black Kids' four-song demo, Wizard of Ahhhs, for free on their MySpace-- it's not available in stores. They're giving away something we can't buy often enough: a record with not just a distinctive aesthetic, but also one single-worthy track after another. Dueling keyboards and scrappy lo-fi guitars give rise to Go! Team-style shouted-back cheers, a communal urgency not unlike the Arcade Fire's, and an uptempo bounce paying homage to Motown 45's. In short, Black Kids make catchy, tightly executed songs that put a memorable stamp on pop's classic themes.

Black Kids offer their most immediate bid for pop dominance with the ridiculously good "I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance With You", which we put on repeat over at Forkcast a couple weeks back. Here, Youngblood's reverb-doused guitar spars with Owen Holmes' declarative bass, Kevin Snow's drums, and bright keyboards by Dawn Watley and Youngblood's sister Ali over whether there will be dancing, or just pogoing.

Even when Youngblood doesn't get the girl, he's an astute enough student of Morrissey's to shade his songs with playful gender ambiguity: "You are the girl that I've been dreaming of ever since I was a little girl," he sings on "I'm Not Gonna Teach". On "Hurricane Jane", a staccato guitar riff leaves room for decadent synths and a bare, melodic bass line. "Oh, you've been playing nice, but I can see it in your eyes/ You're thinking, 'Christ, he's everybody's girl,'" Youngblood describes, then trades question marks for exclamation points on an ecstatically miserable chorus: "It's Friday night and I ain't got nobody/ What's the use of making the bed?" The object of his affection, voiced by either Watley or Ali Youngblood, ain't having it.

On Wizard of Ahhhs, though, it's just as likely the girls will be chasing the boy. Opener "Hit the Heartbrakes" backs up its goofy pun with surging lead guitar and such a cold (if tongue-in-cheek) move that only a guy who can really dance could hope to pull it off. He's really flattered, Youngblood explains, but there's no way he wants to meet the parents, let alone the siblings, nieces, and nephews: "It's quite all right, you can stay the night/ But please be gone by next morning's light." After all, "It's not me, it's you."

The record leads to a beautifully conceited conclusion. On "I've Underestimated My Charm (Again)", Youngblood graciously blames his admirer's pain on his own charisma. He sings this deadpan to a girl caught, in a detail that would make Stuart Murdoch proud, "giving head to a statue." The track also suggests a broader fascination with pop history. There's a possible allusion to Positive K's "I Got a Man", an innocent 1950s chord progression on the verses, and a coda with the ostinato bass of classic Motown-- or at least the Arcade Fire's "Wake Up". "Every time we kiss, it's like an inside joke I always miss," Youngblood finishes.

Black Kids are such good-natured pop-cultural sponges that they opened their fateful Athens Popfest set by reciting a screwball exchange from the Jim Henson-directed David Bowie fantasy film Labyrinth (a back-and-forth borrowed from Cary Grant's The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer). It was an inside joke many might have missed. Black Kids are plenty savvy enough to have known exactly what they were doing when they changed their band's name from World War I femme fatale reference Mata Hari, even though the Youngblood siblings are the group's sole African-American members. Unduly provocative? Personally, I'm shocked to discover a great young guitar group whose name includes the word "Kids." What a world.