Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 23/01/06
Label: Virgin

Essentially, a Britpop album all about splitting up with Katie Melua. Still reading? Luke Pritchard, frontman and chief lyricist of workaday indie pop-rockers The Kooks, is hitherto better known to the "Mail On Sunday" crowd as Katie Melua's Ex, and it'd be surprising if this debut album went far to dispel that image. The ringletted songstress cameos everywhere in this 'sensitive lad'-ish thesis on wounded, lovelorn paranoia.

For example, "She Moves In Her Own Way" - "I was hoping someday she'd be on her way to better things" - is one of about 70 'who-COULD-he mean?' moments. In fact, don't bother trying to switch off the lyric-detecting part of your brain. It's so hard to ignore Pritchard's disarmingly clear and breezy tones that by "You Don't Love Me"'s, er, "You don't love me / The way that I love you" you're ready to storm Château Melua and force the girl at gunpoint to get back with him, thus freeing him up to write songs about something, anything, else.

Strangely, it unfurls pleasantly enough. "Seaside" is a tender little solo acoustic ditty showcasing Pritchard's nice, polite voice. The whole band then cranks into action for the urgent, raggedy "See The World" and its stirring climax, while the suggestive "Sofa Song" has a certain erotic pep (but not quite enough to merit one convert's evaluation of them as 'the British Strokes').

The ska-tinted "Eddie's Gun", with its allusions to impotence, lends a welcome youthful energy to the proceedings and, as though aware they risk sounding more victimised than Michael Barrymore, there's a desperate stab at exuberant Monkees-style swagger in white reggae number "Matchbox" ("The Kooks are out tonight / We're going to walk all over your cars!"). Meanwhile, the musical Scousisms of stand-out track "Ooh La" don't end with the title vernacular, but also encompass a convincing imitation of The La's. More of this, please.

Pritchard has every right to feel narked about the press's obsession with his lovelife (did we mention he was Katie Melua's ex?) but as an identifying feature it is valuable. Nothing else - currently - marks him out from the pack. The overriding feeling after listening to "Inside In / Inside Out" is that, as a musician, he doesn't yet know where he belongs or who he is (spells at posh boarding school Bedales then the Brit School and then watching from the wings as your girlfriend performs at The Brits would, perhaps, do that to a guy).

Greater things may well be in the pipeline for The Kooks, but this is sadly lacking in anything to fall - or indeed remain - in love with.

    by Anna Britten