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the People album, or at least someone trying to imitate it; The Kooks' usual focus on a tuneful rhythm guitar has been replaced by something flashier.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.