This video, this song and this band……….officially suck. It’s hard for me to admit cuz I really dug The Kooks, so much so that I traveled 3 hours to see them on their first US tour. What became of them, I dont know but it happened and its bad.
This latest offering is a seven minute video from hell. If you can survive the first 4 minutes of bad acting youre rewarded with a crappy song. “Around Town” is a sad attempt at pop mainstream from a band still cashing in on its accents. It infuriates me to see that a band could go from such potential to such crap but this sound is dated, unenthused and borderline pathetic. Is this what happens when bands attempt to become pop stars?
They had a great stop at South by SouthWest but then again who didnt? A music forum such as that is set up for rave reviews since the excitement of the event is blurring the actual qualtiy of what you’re seeing. Darn shame.
‘Around Town’ is to be released June 23rd. ‘To me,’ Luke says, ‘this album is about pure expression. Even the way we made the album felt fresh. Rather than us just being a band in a room, playing our guitars with the vocal over the top, which is what we’d always done before, we were really listening to what was going on around us, picking up ideas. The whole thing was much more natural.’
‘Listen’ is made up of 11 tracks (the Deluxe has 15) with highlights including, the street smart garage rock of ‘Bad Habit’, the powerful and haunting ‘See Me Now’ and the incandescent joy of ‘Are We Electric’.
Here is a great example of ‘dont mess with a good thing’.
Oh and back to this crap video- Here’s a quote of ego run amuck. Luke Pritchard of the band explains the creative approach they took when making the video: ‘We decided rather than simply put a video to music we would do something more cinematic. It was very much a collaboration with director Ryan Hope. We wanted to evoke the directors Besson and Tarantino while also exploring themes of Karma and the poem ‘If’.
Oh shut up.
