Artist Profile: The Kooks
Back to England now then, to a band that anyone with UK residency and a radio has likely heard a countless times, but who most Americans are probably criminally unfamiliar with. Yes, they’re a bit of a guilty pleasure. Yes, they sound like what I’d imagine Dispatch experimenting with Britpop to sound like. And yes, they’re about as chart-friendly as it gets in the UK, but The Kooks are undeniably catchy, have a surprisingly good debut album out and two monster singles tearing up the charts over there.
The first of these two singles, “Naïve”, peaked at #5 in the UK and is an instant singalong classic. It became an unofficial summer anthem (the official honor goes to “We Are Your Friends”) among my friends this summer and even made it into our acoustic guitar around-the-campfire singalong playlist (yeah, we’re that cliché) somewhere in between such other Britpop masterpiece’s as “Don’t Look Back In Anger” and “Karma Police”. With that relentlessly catchy chorus and the herky-jerky guitar-based instrumentation, “Naïve” gets stuck in your head and straight-up sets up residence there.
Follow-up single “She Moves In Her Own Way” employs the same formula to equal success and did just as well on the charts (climbing to as high as #7), and their debut album Inside In, Inside Out, chilled at #2 for weeks in the UK, not quite topping the charts but eventually going double platinum nonetheless. Though their music isn’t terribly challenging or of overwhelming artistic merit, it remains impressive that the Kooks have achieved this level of success when not a single one of them has hit the age of 20. While I possess no high hopes for a spectacular follow-up album (I learned my lesson about expectations and chart-friendly Britpop bands with Razorlight), “Naïve” and, to a much lesser extent, “She Moves In Her Own Way” will endure as two of 2006’s essential singles.
MP3s:
“Naive” - The Kooks ((highly recommended))
“She Moves In Her Own Way” - The Kooks
I really should have posted this back in late spring/early summer when I first jumped on the Kooks’ bandwagon, as their relevance has waned recently with their singles’ departure from the charts, so here’s a little treat to keep things up to date. A testimony to the song’s status as one of the biggest hits of 2006, Lily Allen has recorded a cover of “Naïve” for release as a b-side on the upcoming re-release of her debut single, “LDN”. It’s certainly not as good as the original, but it’s still worth a listen and should pique the interest of the minions of Allen fans who are seemingly omnipresent in the blogosphere.
MP3: “Naive” - Lily Allen