Now more than ever, the Kicks' post-punk/garage cred hangs by a thread. Long the whipping boys of New York's revivalist clique, the dorky kids lumped in with the cool Walkmen/Strokes crowd, this foursome's only remaining link to the scene rests in its locale. Somewhere between debut One Time Bells and 2004's Trial of the Century, they morphed into a pop-rock group, about as post-punk or garage as U2's last album. Fittingly, Two Thousand sounds like a wistful, tuckered-out, twilight-of-career album for a band that never saw much daylight.
In all fairness, this album tweaks its predecessor's zonked-out, adult alternative sound. Like the Walkmen's Hamilton Leithauser, French Kicks frontman Nick Stumpf often falls in love with his own croon, deflating songs and blowing potential melodies in the process. This time the Kicks pick up on one of the Walkmen's greatest tricks-- the use of pretty chord changes as hooks. "Cloche" shuffles along innocuously through a nondescript verse until waves of reverb-drenched guitar straight off of Bows + Arrows relieve Stumpf. "Keep It Amazed" inverts the formula, opening strong with catchy surf guitar only to lapse into an overly harmonized climax.
Save for these focused snippets, the band cuts every song from the same cloth; only the Kicks can represent New York as somnolent and homogenous. If not for the obligatory post-punk intros of skittish percussion and spiky guitar riffs demarcating them, these songs would seamlessly mesh one into another. Furthermore, Stumpf's on an emotional merry-go-round, his cadence fluctuating minimally before returning to the starting point. The drumbeat for "Basement D.C." matches that of Phoenix's "One Time Too Many", yet the vocals somehow manage to further soften that song's already soft-rock swagger, making Steely Dan sound like a bunch of coked-out psychopaths.
For all the improved minutiae, French Kicks simply can't shed the "boring" tag. Even now, with nearly every New York band under scrutiny in an anti-hype backlash, they can't even get (nor do they deserve) pity as underdogs, outsiders who did their own thing when Interpol, the Rapture and the Strokes cashed in. I don't want to hate here-- especially since the band commits no fatal errors-- but until these guys realize their potential, they'll keep sounding like 1,000 monkeys chained to 1,000 guitars in the middle of Brooklyn, each one riding a Vespa scooter.
