French Kicks Swimming by: Dan Osmolowski Fri:25-Jul-08 Label: Vagrant Year: 2008 WB rating 61 out of 100

Before the likes of the legendary George Martin and Phil Spector, the job of the record producer would be to replicate the sound of a band playing their instruments in front of an audience. Martin and Spector turned that earnest practice on its collective head. Both would fill the gaps between the band’s instruments using orchestral arrangements and create sound collages using previously unheard-of tape manipulation techniques. They turned the humble craft of recording musicians into an art form. There is a reason Martin was referred to as the ‘fifth Beatle’ and that we still refer to Spector’s patented ‘wall of sound’ to this very day.

So with French Kicks, then, we have a band that has decided to go it alone. And in bassist/vocalist Nick Stumpf’s estimation, Swimming is “by far the closest we’ve come to getting the sound we wanted.” It may well be the sound the band wanted but it’s not quite the sound to launch a hundred thousand downloads from your friendly online music distributor.

Nothing much has changed in the way that the French Kicks (whose closest contemporaries would probably be fellow New Yorkers, The Walkmen) tackle their brand of friendly garage-pop on album number four. There are plenty of catchy hooks on this stripped back effort to have you humming along and coming back for quite a few listens but you can’t quite shake the feeling that something is missing. That ‘something’ is the record’s production. At first it feels like you have been given an un-mastered copy by mistake. On opener, ‘Abandon’ (the album’s strongest track) there is no mid-range in the sound to speak of. The soaring guitar, handclaps, snappy snare drum and Stumpf’s voice all clamor for space in the high-end register before his four-string makes an appearance in the sub-bass area that is usually reserved for those frequency test CDs that car audio freaks use in order to promote unfortunate bowel movements in their competitors. The end result is very discomforting and annoying when you know that, ultimately, you are listening to a catchy and affecting song that has been knocked down a few notches by dodgy production.

Of the rest of the album, it’s one that has some rather charming highs but they are out-weighed by just as many dull numbers that could have been left on the cutting room floor. ‘Said So What’ is one track that actually benefits from the ramshackle production; its rustic percussion and reverb-laden vocals lend it a romantic sway and one gets a rather intoxicating feeling from the sing-along chorus. ‘Carried Away’ is quirky but never reaches the heights that it threatens, ‘Love In The Ruins’ is rubbery and hypnotic but ultimately directionless, and ‘Over The World’ combines with ‘Abandon’ and ‘Carried Away’ to create a fairly strong opening statement. Too often though, the thin and cavernous production does an even poorer job at masking the album’s many underwhelming moments.

Even at 48 minutes (which is not an overly long record by today’s standards) Swimming overstays its welcome by a few too many songs and its sequencing leaves something to be desired. Closer, ‘This Could Go Wrong’ does (go wrong) and the album should have wound up on the prevailing ‘dreaminess’ of ‘All Our Weekends’ which serves to provide an overview of the French Kicks on this album: laid-back and comfortable (read: somewhat lazy and in need of a producer).