The Kooks - Listen

In 20 years the only people who will be listening to The Kooks are the people who are currently listening to The Kooks. Only they will now be mums and dads and forcing The Kooks onto their kids using their car stereos. I would never have heard of Erasure if my dad didn't play them every time I get in his car; and even if I'm not very grateful, I still get a slight jig on hearing the opening bars of A Little Respect. And using my crystal ball, I've managed to deduce a similar, not unjustified fate for The Kooks.

I imagine the reason me and many similarly aged people are still listening now that we're on album four is just a matter of loyalty, of wanting to have as much music to call our own as we can get. Which is my way of saying The Kooks have frequently been good, never great; the albums serviceable - the first two maybe even a little more than that - but never brought up in snobbish conversations about great albums. The Kooks were a bi-product of the music that sprouted up in the mid-naughties - a sort of post-BritPop or indie Madchester with less of the disco and more of the feelings - not the creators of it.

Listen is worrying because it makes me think The Kooks have started to make their albums the way I listen to them; focusing on a few great tracks and not putting much brain function towards the rest. Listen is less of a coherent set than a salvage job. It does (like all their previous albums) highlight a new Kooks sound: funkier and with a lively beat where there was once a lot of empty space. The album's general sound reminded me of the last Foster the People album, or at least someone trying to imitate it; The Kooks' usual focus on a tuneful rhythm guitar has been replaced by something flashier. It's a wider sound for a band used to conjuring up images of the same seaside-fish-and-chips Britain that The Kinks once conjured up. On opener Around Town there's a backing choir to go with the dancey guitar work and heavy-handed lyrics like, "You can choose the life of a bohemian/Or you can choose the material world". It's a strange fit but a fit nonetheless.

The best track is See Me Now which is written as an open letter to frontman Luke Pritchard's now deceased father. It's one of those rare songs that come from such a genuine place that you get floored by the sentiment in every line, and is justification for the album alone. It reminds me a lot of when The Rolling Stones would fit in a gloomy ballad somewhere near the end of a sex-and-bravado rock'n'roll album - it sticks out in a good way. The rest of the album: not so much. The tracks all have the band's new groove and sentiment. Pritchard sings "But all I need is somewhere to lay/Somewhere to lay my hat up/I need someone to love in the middle of the day" and it would be impossible to deny this is a band that can make real, rip-out-your-heart-and-hand-it-over beauty. But most of the tracks sound like early demos, recorded to highlight the new Kooks sound instead of making good songs with it.

A Goodbye to HTMLGiant

When you're really engrossed in something it can be hard to tell if everyone else is engrossed or if it's just you. Something about the forest for the trees. Because, what does the rest of the world matter when you've got this tiny, personal thing that covers your whole vision? And yes, I'm aware that's a pretty deep way to open what is more or less just a send off to an online blog; but I'm aware that despite the outpouring of what one might call a deeply appreciative, weird sort of love from all the scattered different alcoves of the web for HTMLGiant over the last few weeks, you, dear reader, may not even know what an HTMLGiant is.

If you never, in the early hours of some lonely morning, stumbled (clicked) your way to this particular dark side of the web, then at its simplest: HTMLGiant was a blog that ran from September 2008 until sometime last week, written under the guise of being an "alt-lit" blog, a "movement" (if that's what you'd call it) just starting up at the time, although really just a blog where a handful of contributors wrote book reviews, alt-lit and not, trash talked each other, posted funny images and pointless status updates when they were too bummed-out to write something proper, and had a place with a fairly big audience to write out all the usually thought-up-then-forgotten manic ideas that flooded up their craniums, where they might have otherwise just become background dressing on personal blogs no-one would ever read. And for that they deserve some thanks. 

I wouldn't know where to point someone wanting to "get into" the site. The archive's been there for reading for the three or so years I've followed the site but I simply chose to read the posts that came up on my blogger feed and nothing else. Which opens up the trail of thought about how a place like HTMLGiant will be remembered. Your grandad probably read an article in an obscure magazine in his twenties that he thought was the greatest thing he ever read, and it's very probable that that article is on some online archive now, preserved by some small-name publisher. Many times reading HTMLGiant I wondered if it was the greatest thing I'd ever read. Maybe it wasn't, who cares? Memories make everything look shiny and clear, surely the only really great writing to matter to you is the writing that you're thinking is really great right now? The archives will be shut off at some point, and then only the people who were there will have been there. Sad, since HTMLGiant is as good and as worth treading through as any 'movement" or grouped-together cast of writers that I've ever heard of.

Jimmy Chen was my favorite writer there - look through his archives if you're new. I once saw his writing described (in the comments of one of his posts) as every stoned conversation you ever had in college somehow connected together. He eventually got tagged around the site with the word "misogyny", a reputation the whole site straddled with, probably why the recent news of arrests of many high profile alt-lit figures over sexual charges, Tao Lin being the "big one" of alt-lit and covered on the site frequently, was what pushed the site over the edge and what made those running the site decide it was time to pack up.

I don't really feel I need to say more. Others have said multitudes more. Good wishes to all contributors. I hope the archives are up for a long time more. It was a weird little corner of the web that felt like it was doing something so original and doing it with the sort of confidence that made you feel like all the writers' different brands of crazy were so good they'd be the mainstream one day, once everyone caught on, a sign that it was a good enough place that it made you so engrossed you forgot, or maybe just stopped pretending it even fucking mattered, that it wasn't cool and you were the only one in your real life who had even heard of a place called HTMLGiant, but surely that was all part of the fun.