SPACEY JANE – IF THAT MAKES SENSE; THE KOOKS – NEVER/KNOW: REVIEW

SPACEY JANE

If That Makes Sense (Concord)

THE KOOKS

Never/Know (Lonely Cat/Virgin)

LIKEABLE IS NOT THE WORST THING to be called, particularly when the alternative is, say, being Tim Wilson. And making likeable music is not nothing either, particularly when the alternative is, say, Morgan Wallen. So keep that in mind when I say that Spacy Jane and The Kooks have made likeable albums – likeable albums that coincidentally have brought them, stylistically at least, close together.

Spacey Jane (scattered West Australian students who coalesced in Fremantle), releasing their third album in five years, and The Kooks, (formed when they were students in Brighton, on the south coast of England), now with seven albums in 20 years, are bands against which little bad can be said personally. And that’s including the reality of Kooks now being reduced to two, Luke Pritchard and Hugh Harris, after the complicated departures of their original rhythm section, or Spacey Jane being called by The Sydney Morning Herald “Australia’s biggest band”, a title guaranteed to encourage envy and bite-backs.

While both bands began as avowed lovers of fuzzier, occasionally tough rock-with-pop bands – Rolling Stones and Bowie get mentioned; The Strokes and Pixies too – Never/Know and If That Makes Sense play in calmer waters. Kinder waters. Nicer waters.

If you dance to either record, it would be more swaying and hands making shapes; if you’re driving to them it’s more likely, and certainly more advisable, to be a passenger in the back seat gazing out than a driver gripping hard, as the emphasis is not on the beat but on the space (though So Much Taller and the brittle bounce of All The Noise, from Spacey Jane, and Kooks’ springy Tough At The Top may beg to differ).

You get a sense of that in the album titles, which avoid certainty and leave direction to be applied retrospectively. Or leave answers vague enough to be interpreted any which way you choose. In either case, sensible on a marketing level you might argue.

Vocals are north of stoned but south of buzzing, so The Kooks’ Pritchard and Spacey’s Caleb Harper sometimes feel like they are drawling, maybe lacking clarity. But that turns out to be a trick of the ear, like seeing patterns in straight lines when you allow your focus to drift. In How To Kill Houseplants, Harper stretches out lines as if he is half awake and half uncertain and the guitar line echoes this; in Impossible To Say, there’s an ache with upward inflection that reaches out and a lightly sad synth line that responds.

Meanwhile, Pritchard regularly almost floats away in Compass Will Fracture, pulling himself back to earth each time the song the beefy central riff returns, and while the clarity in Let You Go is made to feel somewhat adrift by the greater isolation of the vocals, the light treatment on that voice in If They Could Only Know blurs it back behind the skipping bassline.

Where the Australians differ from Kooks is a greater use of backing vocals, liking the way they can be smeared around Harper in songs like The More That It Hurts and Whateverrrr, enjoying the softening effect too no doubt.

There is another thing that binds both bands, and that is how hard it would be dislike these records. The melodies catch, the rhythms move along, the ideas are anything but stupid and the execution is perfectly fine. There are easy to listen to albums. Indeed, you would have to be some kind of curmudgeon to let anything here grind your gears.

Well, except if you want a sense that the vigour of their live shows had pushed the recordings a step further; if you want something that gets beyond pleasant to memorable; if you want to really dig into music that doesn’t just open itself to the first prod.

It may not be there is a lack of ambition from them, one having survived two decades, albeit without ever getting to the top tier, and the other being the biggest band in Australia, though that title is not exactly a hard task in these much reduced circumstances for local artists and labels. But there definitely is a lack of wonder at this end. I wonder what might have happened had they maybe tweaked some of the potentially trippier bits; maybe punched through some of the coating of sweetness; maybe hurried some of the tempos. Maybe surprised or tested a listener.

Two likeable records by two likeable bands is nice – and in a shitty world where the election of a religious leader who isn’t frothing at the mouth about women, foreigners or someone’s sex is the second best news of the year, nice is something to hold on to – but beyond this month or this year, that’s not really enough is it?

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Listen to Spacey Jane – If That Makes Sense

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