Garage punks French Kicks have lit on a sound that is boldly, authentically, uniquely their own. Those adverbs have run their course, but here they describe a young band's maturation from victims of their scene and prisoners of their studio into a band willing to tinker with composition and to savor accident. Gone is the hip shtick of past outings, each riff and melody weighed down by polish and forethought. Now they've realized that fucking up is part of art. Rock'n'roll is all about romance and instinct, they say, and about the possibility of being betrayed by both. You have to risk it, risk error. As an Irish writer rightly assured himself: Mistakes can shove an artist toward discovery.
The French Kicks discovered that they can peer inward. Maybe they're no longer burdened by the pressures to be a New York Band alongside the Strokes and the Walkmen, or by some duty to radiate tragedy and defibrillate post-punk. Production plays a large part in the band's turn to richer, larger emotions. Mixing and producing their new album, Swimming, has enabled them to wring truth and wrest intimacy from the sterile, unromantic process of music making in the laptop era. They bid adieu to the high-tech sheen of 2006's Two Thousand. It's a bravely nostalgic turn, to curb the impulse to digitally cut, paste, and Ctrl-Z your work until a radically reworked seventh take seems immaculately conceived.
And that is how it seems. Swimming channels the medium-voltage jolt of the French Kicks' recent live appearances: not too much, not too little. Easing down a middle path, "Abandon" wipes away the memory of the New York bandwagons, and replaces it with rock's version of the way of all flesh: the "growing up and mellowing out" record. This is the rare case where this doesn't translate into soul-swallowing boredom. There's irony in the song title, as this Brooklyn lullaby is short on rebel wildness. But in another way, the title hits the target: The band is abandoning abandon. No more of that secondhand scorn of well-heeled kids trying to ape the Stooges or Gang of Four. Here the sass is concentrated in that pointy, chiming guitar line, only to be washed out, like a splotch of marinara, by the onrushing harmonies.
Post-punkers who warm to "Abandon" will take to the equally jagged "Love in the Ruins". The cavernous bump of the percussion has not only a human warmth, courtesy of the roomy recordings, but a solidity that balances out all the weightless surroundings. Like clockwork, the bass drum tramples and thwacks, while the Talking Heads nod "Carried Away" soars and glistens. Along the same lines, swinging stick-work firmly grounds the Beach Boys breeze wafting through "Atlanta" and "Said So What".
As Josh Wise and Nick Stumpf swap time at the microphone, their earthy falsettos-- evoking both a backwoods longing ("All Our Weekends") and an urban malaise ("The Way You Arrive")-- accomplish the bipolar task of launching the songs skyward and rooting them in the soil. Thick with both a springtime twinkle and autumnal heartache, Swimming makes good on the band's early promise. Trading layers of mood and melody and meaning for layers of Pro Tooled artifice, French Kicks have razored off the bullshit, leaving a core of beguilingly honest tunes.
