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20YAT #21 Kenickie – At The Club

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UK album chart peak: #9

If you’d just written a debut album of spiky guitar pop indebted to UK music of the 70s, and laced it with social observations from the fringes of British life and tales of youthful hijinks, it seems unfortunate to release it at a time when the public are just starting to lose their taste for such things. But, on the surface at least, that’s the predicament in which Kenickie found themselves with At The Club, a record enjoyably full of regional accents, infectious melodies and the sort of (post-)punk homages that Ash, Supergrass and Elastica had been peddling for the past couple of years.

Thankfully, though, there’s more to At The Club than just a Britpop death spasm. Indeed, with its edges left deliberately rough and its endearingly shambling musicianship, the album sounds like traditional lo-fi indie-pop that’s been transmuted by Britpop rather than written in its shadow; on closer inspection its apparent bad timing looks more like a studied reaction to the music that preceded it, as opposed to a tribute.

Accordingly, spirited thrash is prefered here to slick-sounding production, and lyrical triumphalism and self-mythology is replaced by the sort of knowing self-disgust and sarcasm that was the usual preserve of the (Richey-era) Manics or The Smiths – or even that great nemesis of the Britpop movement, Nirvana: when Lauren Laverne sings “I’m so ugly, but I pick my feelings so I choose not to mind,” on Robot Song, or “I think that everyone looks better when they’re sad,” on Brother John, a sense of manifesto redolent of those earlier bands starts to emerge, in which sensitivity and self-awareness are presented as comfort blankets against the mainstream world’s brutality, and outsiders are welcomed and empathised with.

That said, Kenickie's angst was never as lacerating as its forebears’ – more Sunderland than South Wales, Salford or Seattle, perhaps – which allows At The Club to retain plenty of wilfully poppy moments: so it is that Classy resembles a more menacing, disillusioned answer song to Supergrass’ Alright (“We have a laugh falling down, smashing cars”), and Punka, despite its scorn and backing vocals that appear to call the protagonist a plonker, remains as irresistibly loveable as any mid-90s guitar pop song. Then there’s In Your Car, built from little more than yeah-yeah-yeahs and sass, and that sense of frivolity, of not taking oneself too seriously, becomes one of At The Club’s most charming characteristics. Indeed, where other bands might’ve let the attendant tension between indie alienation and pop sugar get the better of them – see Bis’ flawed attempt a few weeks earlier – here it seems perfectly natural.

For all their refreshing spirit, though, Kenickie didn’t last long, and twenty years on, from one angle, they resemble little more than a footnote to Lauren Laverne’s TV and radio career. That’s unfair, though: as Britpop waned, they were among a handful of bands to emerge who successfully revisited the sort of introspection that had been sidelined by Oasis’ bulldozers. Records like At The Club once again allowed nervousness to be presented with inclusivity and defiance, and even a little jollity, to an audience who’d cut their teeth on Britpop’s braggadocio. In the coming years that would lead to the ascent of the likes of Belle And Sebastian and Badly Drawn Boy (for better and for worse). Either way, At The Club might often be characterised as coming at the very end of Britpop. Two decades on, though, it appears actually to have arrived at the very start of something a little different.

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Also out this week:
Foo Fighters – The Colour And The Shape (Roswell). Chart peak #3
Bentley Rhythm Ace – Bentley Rhythm Ace (Skint). Chart peak #13