On ‘Listen’, the Kooks have set out to prove that you can teach an indie band new tricks. This is an almost feverishly diverse effort when placed next to the post-millennial Kinks shuffle of their early stuff. And it’s nowhere near as good.
First, though, all credit to Luke Pritchard and the gang for putting it out there. While it’s a failed experiment, ‘Listen’ remains a pretty fearless album.
By pushing themselves in new directions they have peeled back some comfortable layers and opened up their flaws to greater scrutiny. That was always going to be a possibility, but they did it anyway. When you’re a band with commercial expectations, that takes guts.
A biproduct of this, perhaps, is that its more routine moments stick out like sore thumbs. See Me Now never rises above sub-Naive emoting, while the guitars that drive It Was London, their take on the riots of 2011, can’t push it beyond being a paint-by-numbers treatment of a complex situation.
In its more expressive moments, ‘Listen’, has a few surprising moves, many of them cribbed from classic soul and R&B. Around Town’s bank of backing vocals is a clarion call of sorts, one taken up by the first of Peter Denton’s dancing basslines. It’s the best shot they manage to land and elsewhere the transition is far less comfortable.
Down, with its faux-funk and ‘down down diggy’ chorus, is the main culprit, but the burbling synths of Westside and Are We Electric run it close. Bad Habit’s guitar drop and winsome falsetto, meanwhile, only serve to highlight the discrepancy between what the Kooks want to do and what they're good at doing.
The Kooks Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Thu November 06 2014 - LEICESTER O2 Academy Leicester
Fri November 07 2014 - BRIGHTON Brighton Dome
Sat November 08 2014 - MANCHESTER Manchester Academy 1
Mon November 10 2014 - NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE O2 Academy Newcastle
Tue November 11 2014 - ABERDEEN Aberdeen Music Hall
Thu November 13 2014 - LEEDS O2 Academy Leeds
Fri November 14 2014 - SHEFFIELD O2 Academy Sheffield
Sat November 15 2014 - BIRMINGHAM O2 Academy Birmingham
Mon November 17 2014 - BRISTOL O2 Academy Bristol
Tue November 18 2014 - CAMBRIDGE Corn Exchange Cambridge
Wed November 19 2014 - BOURNEMOUTH O2 Academy Bournemouth
Fri November 21 2014 - NORWICH Norwich Uea
Sat November 22 2014 - CARDIFF Cardiff University Students Union
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