Konk
Astralwerks
April 15, 2008
The Kooks (you remember, those guys that gave us "Jackie Big Tits" and that fantastic cover of "Young Folks"), have returned with a grand album loaded with doo-doos and ooh-oohs the likes of which we've never seen. It's around this time of year that we start to consider what the great summer records might be, and at this point in the game I'm willing to offer applications from the Brit-Pop community (perhaps seriously for the first time since 1999). Konk is every single album that The Arctic Monkeys were supposed to have given us but never really seemed capable of delivering.
Lyrically, they're Blur when Damon isn't enduring a terrible separation, musically they're Oasis while Noel is enduring a terrible separation. While it's certainly disposable pop music, it's disposable pop music in that British sort of way… the only culture that seems to have the power to make disposable summertime pop records become decade-old, genre defining anthems. To suggest that Konk has the power to do such a thing would be silly, however, I'd wager that most critics didn't expect to hear My Chemical Romance covering "Song 2" roughly a decade later.
While Luke Pritchard (one of the best names in rock & roll) may not have the enigmatic star-power of Pete Dougherty, he has one thing that Mr. Kate Moss never had… genuine talent. I may stand alone in my aggression toward all things Libertines, but one listen to the Doobie Brothers influenced "Gap" serves as a strong reminder that in a post-Oasis world, very few bands ever came close to deserving a sniff of the torch. While many became walking caricatures of themselves, others chose to buy up every Undertones B-Side and cram their faces into speakers blasting BBC 1. Hey, sometimes it hurts, and every now and then it requires a slight bit more than a heroin habit and a bowler hat.
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