"You Don't Love Me" / The Kooks

28 DAYS OF LOVE SONGS

Okay, so I'm writing about the Kooks again--wanna make something of it? I like this young band, with their cheeky retro BritBeat sensibility. They may have released this song in 2006, but it isn't all bogged down by irony and bogus postmodern lassitude. It's about a guy who's in love, and it's not working out for him, and he's upset about it -- what a refreshing throwback.

I love songs that start in mid-argument: “But you don’t love me the way that / I love you,” he sings, in a mournful mumbly tone (though the jaunty syncopation and thrusting guitar strums save it from sounding mopey or bitter). It's like he's been listening to her go on and on, blah-blah blah, and now finally he's getting a word in edgewise. He already knows that the relationship's doomed, and he's even willing to blame her: “Cause if you did, girl, you would not / Do those things you do.” (I love the two-beat pause between lines, the way it makes you wait for the other shoe to drop.) Going even further, he claims that she does this stuff on purpose, just to toy with his affections: "You kill my heart just to see if /I will rise / Above your anger and / Above your lies." It's like she's the sorority sister of that girl in the Buzzcocks song the other day -- a real bitch on wheels.

And furthermore -- since they're talking about it -- he has another bone to pick, in the bridge: "And all I see of you / Is when you're 'not so busy.'" As the line soars up into his falsetto range, the doubled vocals put this "not so busy" line in quotation marks -- that's what she calls it; but he's not buying it. He comes back in a short punchy line, "Oh, you're not so busy!", his vocals curdling angrily. Do we think she's seeing somebody else behind his back? I bet he does, and I bet she is.

Up to now, this has sounded like a doormat boyfriend finally speaking up for himself. If she's really this mean, why is he still with her? In verse two, though, he adds a little depth, with a poignant line: "You turned my life around / For that I am glad." For just a minute, I wonder if he's going to back down, but then, with a few more fierce grating strums, he girds his loins: "However much I love you / This love is getting bad." (Weak glad/bad rhyme, but it's the closest he's come yet to breaking things off.

I don't think he's totally made up his mind to leave her, though. In the second bridge he switches back and forth, complaining about "the words that only you could use" and then swearing "But you know you'll always be my girl, girl." And the fadeout (the track I'm listening to is the acoustic Live at Abbey Road version) is him fretting over and over, "But you don't love me, you don't care!" He hits that word "love" with such intense frustration, and peters off in a lonely wail on "care" -- poor guy. He's a hopeless romantic, isn't he? He wishes she'd change, and he knows she won't, but he wishes she would...it's the essence of being Unhappy In Love.

You Don't Love Me sample

"She Moves In Her Own Way" /
The Kooks

This song has been haunting me lately, and sometimes when I find myself humming it, it takes a minute for me to recall what decade it dates from -- that's proof of how well these guys channel the 60s Beat sound. I thought it was just me, but then today on the supermarket muzak, right between Freda Payne's "Band of Gold" and Jackson Browne's "Doctor My Eyes," up popped this catchy-as-hell track by the Kooks. Talk about your instant classics . . .

So even though I've already writtten about the Kooks here, I've got to give them an encore. The version I have on my iTunes, actually, isn't the album track from 2006's Inside In/Inside Out -- it's an acoustic version, from the Kooks' appearance on that Live At Abbey Road TV program. (Some day I've really got to watch that show.) The simpler recording works better, I think; the essence of this song is its crisp, light-hearted bounce. Its skiffle-like backbeat rhythms, the exuberant octave jumps in the melody, were born to be sung over guitar strums. (A ukelele would even work, come to think of it.)

I have to admit, the subtext of this song is baffling. Does he love the girl he's singing about/to? He can't even get his pronouns straight -- sometimes she's "you," sometimes she's "she" -- or are there two girls in the picture? In the verses, she sounds like a pain in the butt, with her "tiresome paper dreams," her "tempered furs and spangled boots," her attempts to "pull his strings" ("So at my show on Monday / I was hoping someday / You'd be on your way to better things" -- that sounds like he'd be glad to get rid of her). But in the chorus he insists, "Well, uh oh, I love her because she moves in her own way / But uh oh she came to my show just to hear about my day." Hmm, now he seems to dig her.

If this is the same girl he's talking about both places, she's really got him in a tailspin. At one point, he tells her, "So won't you go far / Tell me you're a keeper"; in the last verse he's saying, "Yes I wish that we never made it." Or is he talking there about wishing the band had never become famous? Beats me. Way too many young songwriters think they can dash off opaque lyrics, full of you-had-to-be-there references, and expect their listeners to go along for the ride. Someone needs to go take Ray Davies' songwriting course and learn a bit about song structure and clear storytelling.

But this song is just too perky to be about a girl he hates, or about a suffocating relationship, or the perils of show-biz fame. The minute it comes on, I get caught up in that happy-go-lucky beat; Luke Pritchard's boyish tenor delivery is intensely likeable (I can't help hearing a little Peter Noone in his guttural accent, though it's probably more like the Arctic Monkeys than like Herman's Hermits).

Still, those 60s echoes keep coming through. When he sings "moving on to better things," immediately I think of the Kinks' "Better Things"; the line about "It's not about your make-up / Or how you try to shape up" calls up the Beatles' "For No One" ("she wakes up / she makes up / she takes her time and doesn't feel she has to hurry / she no longer needs you"). Even that "paper dreams" phrase evokes the old Traffic song "Paper Sun" (with a melodic nod to "Coloured Rain" as well). These guys clearly know their early BritPop classics; I just don't think this is accidental.

Between the lazy navel-gazing lyrics and the footnotable references to other music, this track is a whole lot more postmodern than it seems. It's got way more style than substance. Still, as we used to say on American Bandstand, it has a great beat and I can dance to it. And when it comes to rock & roll, hey, that's mostly what counts.

She Moves In Her Own Way sample

“Love It All” / The Kooks

You have to love a band that names its sophomore album after Konk, the recording studio Ray Davies and the Kinks set up in North London. Granted, these kids were just paying customers in the studio – Ray didn’t produce the album or anything – but it’s nice to see that they’re properly appreciative of the Kink heritage.

Not unusually for a second album, Konk shows the Kooks going for a “fuller” sound – which just means that now they’ve got enough money, they’re not stuck with bare-bones garage-band arrangements. Personally I liked the uncluttered bounciness of their earlier songs like “You Don’t Love Me” and “She Moves In Her Own Way.”

Luckily they’ve hung onto that buoyant tone. “Love It All” shuffles along with a reggae-tinged rhythm that harks back to the Police, only with a little more jangly guitar. Sure, Luke Pritchard’s yelping Cockney-inflected vocals have adolescent anxiety all over them, but the lyrics connect the two: “See I've got this woman here / She loves me all the time / No need for excuses / No pressures in my mind.” This is unfamiliar territory for him, maybe (in verse two he declares “My heart was living down / And I’ve been pushed over the line”), but he’s just beginning to believe in her gospel.

His friends help out with lush cascading harmonies in the chorus, repeating “She said: love it all, love it all, love it all” over and over. (Great for concert singalongs, too, I’ll bet.) I love how rapidly they flip off those “love it all’s,” like a determined little mantra. Pritchard repeats it solo at the end, as if he’s still trying to convince himself – like Dorothy repeating “There’s no place like home” at the end of The Wizard of Oz.

It’s upbeat, yes, but not with cheap optimism – it feels to me like he’s fending off an undertow of disillusion and battered hopes the whole time. It’s one thing to do a simple song, quite another thing to make it satisfying. Having a bigger budget doesn’t do that for you; working in a legendary studio doesn’t do it either. But knowing who your musical forbears are, and honoring them -- that’s the ticket.

Love It All sample