The Kooks embrace all Berlin has to offer on their sixth studio album.
Trying to explain ancient history is always a challenge.
To look at things now it’s hard to believe, for instance, that Germany’s capital Berlin was once divided by a concrete wall and fought over by the Communist Soviet Union and the West.
It’s almost as difficult to convince people who didn’t live through it that indie rock – albeit a pretty sanitised version – was once British music’s dominant force in the mid-noughties, as bands like Keane, Coldplay and Snow Patrol shifted CDs like they were going out of style. Which of course they were.
The Kooks were also beneficiaries of what was unofficially recognised as the Arctic Monkeys Effect, the momentum the Sheffielders created helping their 2005 debut Inside In/Inside Out to sell a million-and-a-half copies in Britain alone.
Fronted by Luke Pritchard, it bestowed on the group a level of success they were unprepared for – and as indie’s star faded, so did they, their reputation tarnished by parent-worrying talk of drug issues.
Back to the present, and as with many veteran acts the streaming era has created them a new audience, with Pritchard still at the helm. Now effectively a trio, they relocated to Berlin for the sessions which would eventually become 10 Tracks To Echo In The Dark, a location chosen mostly due to the singer’s intense feelings of disillusionment in the wake of Brexit. ‘It’s a free place, it’s not so consumed by commerciality,’ he’s said of the decision, adding, ‘It’s not necessarily the people, it’s the place.’
The band’s sixth album also marks a Europhile change of direction musically, as collaborators Tobias Kuhn, German duo Milky Chance and Swedish producer Neikid have all been drafted in to offer some fresh perspectives.
For Pritchard, writing was tempered by the advent of a new relationship and becoming a father for the first time. These horizons are celebrated on the breezy synth-pop of opener Connection, a love song with its heart right on its sleeve, whilst the cod-reggae of Beautiful World is a damp-eyed tribute to his young son.
He’s still aware enough however to understand what The Kooks can and cannot do. Despite the contemporary makeover, tracks like Jesse James, Sailing On A Dream and Cold Heart are still more in the mould of Foals or Bastille than the avant-garde techno which dominates Berlin’s edgier nightlife.
That wouldn’t be them, but if simplicity and its almost-twin disposability have been the group’s key spoken and unspoken qualities since the start, then losing one alone is hard to do.
Coming to terms with this takes a bravery only those who’ve been to the other side can muster, and on Oasis we hear Pritchard staring it down for the first time: ‘Sitting in a daze, I never felt comfortable/I’m insecure, but you make it achievable’.
In this maze, the best new version of themselves lies with the stripped back funk and vocoder-tinged Modern Days, but it’s the closer Without A Doubt – an acoustic ballad about finding redemption through the strength of someone else – which wisely makes a virtue of timelessness.
That’s the trouble with ancient times, what’s happened has happened and can never be changed – be it votes, pleasing the suits or giving in to temptation.
10 Tracks To Echo In The Dark is a work on which its creators have been perceptive enough to know that, but it does make The Kooks sound like their history is firmly in the past.
