The name of this band puts me off, but their name is the only thing that puts me off about the French Kicks. There is not a song I would skip on their new disc, but for now I will focus on “Love in the Ruins”, which is great in context or as a standalone, or an introduction to the French Kicks. I guess that’s called a single.
Is that a ukulele in the beginning? Whatever it is, I like it because it’s misleading. Kind of a switcheroo the Kicks are pulling on us. “Love in the Ruins” is not a fast song by most standards, but it does move along at a pace that I didn’t expect upon hearing the opening chords. Which is weird, because the tempo doesn’t actually change at all. Music.
The bass part comes in halfway through the verse and is just sexy. When I flipped through the liner notes for Swimming, I noticed that they thank the Walkmen. I can hear that Brooklyn stuff in the bass track. Surely I’m not the only one who lumped all those Brooklyn bands together and got sick of all of them at the same time, but the French Kicks are breathing new life into the scene. It’s not annoying to me anymore.
The chorus, the chorus. The chorus represents the thing I love most about this band: laziness. The vocal tracks just sound so lazy and slurred and it’s fantastic. They really have the loose-feel thing down to a science. Which is weird, because it’s like a paradox… right?
One more thing I would like to note is the verse that cuts the bass out again. There a lot of moments on the record that work because of spaces, silences, subtractions. This is one of them. So good.
French Kicks - Love In The Ruins
Go to the French Kicks’ , or their MySpace.
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