Plumbiferous Media

The 1990s are a three-man indie band from Glas­gow, com­posed of Jackie McK­e­own (for­merly of the Yummy Furs), Michael McGaugh­rin, and Dino Bar­dot. Their newest album, Kicks fol­lows the well-received Cook­ies, released in 2007. How­ever, Kicks does not in any way match up to Cook­ies, and is, in fact, some­what awful.

One of the actu­ally refresh­ing parts of Kicks is the return of the bass part to an, at times even coun­ter­pun­tal, har­mony, rather than the dull ‘one, one, five, four one’ over­sim­pli­fied chord deno­tor. The con­stantly impres­sive, always appar­ent bass part was quite pos­si­bly the best indi­vid­ual part of the album. The gui­tar fared sim­i­larly well, but some over-repetition, and ran­dom effect changes rem­i­nis­cent of mid­dle school tal­ent shows cer­tainly did not help. As for the drum­mer, his lines were inter­est­ing, but they often lacked the rhyth­mic con­sis­tency the tracks often needed. While the instru­ments fared mod­er­ately well, the vocals did not.

Jackie McKeown’s vocals match the ener­getic, eclec­tic style of the 1990s well, and so our com­plaints with them don’t lie in their com­bi­na­tion with the music. McKeown’s vocals are also, though nearly always out of tune, cer­tainly suc­cess­ful at evok­ing the sound of clas­sic rock, but it’s not entirely clear that this is a ben­e­fi­cial attribute on Kicks, which would have ben­e­fited from stay­ing near the indie aes­thet­ics of the 1990s’s last album, Cook­ies. Instead, as McK­e­own cries out line after line, his voice begins to seem increas­ingly over­done and almost unnat­ural. This effect is cer­tainly wors­ened by the rep­e­ti­tion of the music, as well as the 1990s’s seem­ing igno­rance of any rhyth­mic aesthetics.

How­ever mediocre McKeown’s vocals may be, the lyrics he sings are even worse. Entirely com­posed of plat­i­tudes and inane sto­ries, the lyrics are unin­ven­tive, bor­ing, and frankly irri­tat­ing. As McK­e­own sings about “blow­ing bub­bles like you just don’t care,” we’re left with the impres­sion that Kicks could have been tol­er­a­ble, even given McKeown’s voice, if the 1990s had got­ten a bet­ter song­writer (or per­haps a song­writer at all). How­ever, no such luck, and it’s prob­a­bly best to assume that when it comes to writ­ing decent lyrics, the 1990s “don’t even know what that is.”

Over­all, every­thing the instru­ments built up to was cut down by McKeown’s weak vocals and weaker lyrics. That’s not to say that the sounds would have been great with­out him, as the gui­tar, bass, and drums are by no means front-line parts. They are almost exclu­sively meant to sup­port the vocals, but no amount of sup­port ended up being enough. An addi­tional prob­lem with Kicks was in a fair amount of need for more track diver­sity, although, then again, the lighter tracks always seemed to be the weakest.

Most of the mem­bers of the 1990s clearly have musi­cal skill, and there are places where it is expressed in Kicks. But, for all the out­lined rea­sons, most notably McK­e­own, the album was not what it could have been. Quite frankly, McK­e­own needs to try and remem­ber how to sing.

This post is tagged 1990s, 30-39