What stops a sub-culture becoming the culture itself? Limited appeal? Snobbery? Ineptitude? As New Rock ‘N’ Roll, whatever that is exactly, continues to gatecrash Top Of The Pops and pose for untold Smash Hits centrefolds, an undercurrent of electro japery has formed, kids pulling similar shapes to those towering above them, making comparable noises with alternative instruments and naively acting like the knife’s edge is still more theirs 20 years after Depeche Mode took the same thing mainstream. Some, like The Faint and Kasabian have admittedly met some of the genre’s rhetoric head on while others, like Chikinki and The Koreans, seem incapable of pushing hard enough to make any real impression. It’s not that this is inaccessible at all – you don’t necessarily stay ghettoised because you want to, but because you can’t buy yourself out. And when you make your own currency there can be few excuses.
The Koreans’ debut is virile in spirit and belief, there is no doubting that. It takes rock and roll’s swagger and wires it up – this isn’t dance music to dance to, this is dance music to strut to. Which is all good, some of us have trouble with the dancing anyway, and everyone can manage a credible strut. But it also sounds like a badly quoted porch extension to the Dandy Warhol’s ‘Welcome To The Monkeyhouse’ vanity project, which was full of desire but largely empty of inspiration, like man’s eternal three sheets to the wind, after-closing-time stereotype. And The Koreans’ seem sober on top of that.
It isn’t an appalling record, it has its moments. ‘It Keeps Coming’ is Gary Numan on helium, which is admittedly quite endearing. ‘Slow Motion’ is fairly hypnotic and driving compared to the pre-written programming that runs much of the album. As much as ‘Keep Me In Your Mind’ and ‘How Does It Feel’ may strategically outwit The Music, the likes of ‘Broken Spell’, ‘Land Of The Free’ and ‘Machine Code’ are just diet Faint, which although still reasonably tasty lacks the syrupy head rush – and ultimately the inadvisable badness – of the full version. There’s no explanation at any point as to why we should care, it’s like walking in halfway through a film, it coasts, it has no sense of necessity and no ultimate conclusion. You certainly won’t find these particular Koreans on any axis of evil, sadly you’d be lucky to find them on any list of consequence.