French Kicks

French Kicks’ Nick Stumpf didn’t seem particularly enthused when I said hello before his band’s recent show at the Picador in Iowa City. He seemed a bit rundown by the long winding road that had taken his band from New York to the West Coast and back home via the Midwest. I asked how the band was doing and he just kind of laughed and remarked, “We’re OK. We’re still around, right?”

It was funny in a way, Stumpf’s utter disaffection for his wonderful art project. It was also kind of sad; it felt like the they were buying into a false mythology of the French Kicks created by critics like myself. The band, perhaps more than others who get a lot of coverage in the alternative press, have long been marked as shoulda-beens, as a group who, despite great records and live shows, just never made it big. In even writing that last sentence, I’m continuing this erroneous mythology, building the inescapable cliché that plagues this band. Here’s the thing: the French Kicks are a really nuanced, powerful, and soulful pop band, yet it seems like even they don’t know it anymore, as if they’ve read too much about their underappreciated records and have seen the other bands from New York’s graduating class of the early 2000s (the Walkmen and the Strokes in particular) take off with more widely appreciated careers. I feel my whole analysis of the subject is indeed rote, but I am making a point here. No matter how dismayed they might be, the French Kicks are are known but not worshiped, good but not (yet) canonical, and it’s this seemingly middling positioning that makes them so special.

At any rate, this show was pretty good, not the best outing from the French Kicks but a competent rendition of a set filled with chiming arrangements and lush harmonies. Most of the thirteen-song set played off the band’s latest record Swimming (2008). A little more subdued than it’s blazing predecessor Two Thousand (2006), the songs on Swimming are mellow thickly-arranged pop nuggets, each one of them laced with Stumpf and occasional singer Josh Wise’s slow-burning croons. As a result, the set was dreamy and hypnotic, the crowd of sixty or so fans hunched up close the stage, their bodies nodding back and forth as the four-piece methodically moved through the set. The songs built towards pleasant swells with both Stumpf and Wise singing and playing complimentary guitar lines while the rhythm section chugged along with precision. The most rocked-out moment of the night was “So Far We Are” (the opening song from Two Thousand). It was perhaps the only time the crowd slipped out of hypnosis and started pumping their fists in the air. More aggressive moments like it could have punctuated this otherwise mellow set, but most folks were pleased nonetheless; a mellow set from the Kicks is still a sublime experience.