Review Summary: There really is nothing better than playing it safe.
Here’s a band of white boys with an exclamation point in their name and a crow on their album cover. Or maybe it’s a raven. I’ve never really been able to tell the difference. Either way, Kubichek!’s first and only album,
Not Enough Night, certainly embodies the juvenile spirit of punctuation in a band name and bird-based iconography; it’s mad about something or other, displeased, angsty, cynical and only sometimes capable of articulating why it’s any of these things in the first place. It’s definitely not an album for me, but its repetitive nature and histrionic tone just makes me think it might not be all that great in the first place.
Funny enough, this very month marks ten years since the record’s release. Since then, the paradigm of the UK rock scene seems to have shifted dramatically with English and Irish artists like alt-j and Two Door Cinema Club essentializing shinier, more experimental production alongside their eccentric delivery. Kubichek! confidently reside a little earlier in the genre’s history, closer to Franz Ferdinand and The Futureheads than some of the sunnier, more polished artists that have emerged from the following decade.
Not Enough Night sounds something like the last of its kind, full of aggressive guitar melodies and emotive garage-rock that remains relatively untainted by more contemporary impulses.
And perhaps it’s my limited knowledge of the genre, but
Not Enough Night never feels genuinely committal to me. It’s heartbroken and scorned but it’s also frustratingly monotonous and monochromatic. The Newcastle four piece rarely waver from the format established on opener “Roman Is Better,” where they smack the listener with a hard and fast guitar bit, speed up the percussion a little, and then barrel forward for the rest of the album. It hardly relents. But instead of coming across as sublime or overwhelming, it ends up exasperating, the same bitter ideas repeated over and over again until it loses its meaning like a word said too many times.
On their own, these aren’t bad songs. “Hometown Strategies” is right on the cusp of greatness with its weary admission set to a banging guitar line, “Everybody’s on their own / Searching for a purpose / Everybody wants more / Everybody who?” But in that same song we hear some command to “remove your hometown” flung repeatedly against the wall without any real weight or particular definition. I caught my attention drifting away from the lyrics over and over again with groaners like “this is your problem, it needs to be solved by you” tuning me all the way out. That’s really the problem with the whole album: for every earworm like “Nightjoy” there’s entire stretches of music that are neither inventive nor memorable. It never feels like lead vocalist Michael Coburn really knows what he’s singing and because of that, I didn’t feel like I knew either.
Maybe that’s just me. Maybe that’s my hesitance to sit with a band of men singing petty *** about their ex-girlfriends and hometowns, or maybe it’s just my pretty obvious bias that changes the way I listen to music. I don’t personally connect to what’s up on this record and it makes enjoying the more conventional aspects of the cut and dry rock offered on
Not Enough Night a little more strenuous.
That said, the group’s most dynamic moments are their best. When they slow down the pace for standouts like “Hope Is Impossible,” I felt the sentiments they were conveying connected with me on a more engaging level. Sweeping statements like “I’ve got nothing more than what you see” sound considerably more genuine when Kubichek! couple them with a set of spacier instrumentals. Closer “Just Shut It Down” is the pinnacle of what the band can do and remains a valuable cut from an album I found otherwise pretty bland, full of dramatic and satisfying strains on the familiar guitar resounding throughout. It’s an arresting twist that actually sells the melancholy and listlessness I think the rest of the project was trying to capture.
It’s interesting that when listening to these songs online I encountered dozens of comments, recently posted, of people yearning for the band’s return. Someone claimed their uncle was the guitar player, another remembered a particularly meaningful concert in Newcastle some ten years ago now. I can see how the spirited and lively rock of
Not Enough Night could connect with so many other people, but a decade later and with a listener like me I can hardly blame the album for not appealing to my tastes.
But when it comes down to it, I still can’t remember a single line from the album off the top of my head.
