Kubichek! - Not Enough Night

As much as this pains me, there really is no avoiding it - Kubichek sound a lot like Editors. Only the most obtuse (or deaf) could argue that much of the Newcastle band’s debut Not Enough Night does not draw upon the same ‘more is more’ hi-hat obsession and overpowering single-string guitar line template that characterises the 2005 winners of ‘Birmingham’s Most Singularly Dull Band’ award*. Thankfully, as Interpol have shown, this formula does not necessarily equal the mind numbing angular boredom of endlessly repeated non-sequiturs delivered by Disney’s version of Ian Curtis that constituted The Back Room, and so it proves with Kubichek.

The method may be well tried, but such application is not. Nearly every song on Not Enough Night features a chorus that I would not hesitate to call anthemic, had not that particular adjective been irretrievably devalued by incessant descriptive use in hyped up reviews of northern neanderthals in silk scarves. The fact remains, however, that while most bands of their ilk overplay their trump card, repeating relentlessly a generally meaningless hookline (as in ‘you don’t need this disease’), Kubichek hold back a little, to the extent that some of the songs could actually benefit from a repeated chorus at the end. Ultimately, though, it is a reticence that works in their favour, as it moves the album from one that could be, perhaps harshly, labelled ‘obvious’ to one that requires and enables repeated listening.

Lyrically too, Not Enough Night succeeds where most fail by delivering tales of provincial drudgery and crushed ambition without descending into hollow accounts of the joys of buying a bag of chips and beating up a taxi driver. ‘Home Town Strategies’, in particular, succinctly describes the frustrations of living amongst those who refuse to see further than the end of their street, while surely no-one who has experienced the torturous death throes of a long term relationship could fail to be moved by ‘Stutter’’s plaintive cry of ‘It doesn’t matter where we go tonight/It ends in disaster/I think we’ve gone full circle now’.

True, the album does get a little repetitive towards the end, and Kubichek will certainly have to widen their palette to avoid future releases falling into the pitfalls that Not Enough Night manages to evade, but as soon as a guitar line as undeniably infectious as that featured on ‘Outwards’ kicks in, all potential criticism is forgotten. There is a reason why so many bands submit to the tyranny of the hi-hat and it is this: when it works, it still provides some of the finest moments indie rock has to offer. Not Enough Night may not have the consistency to reach those heady heights throughout, but it comes pretty damn close.

*current holders - the Twang