French Kicks

Two Thousand

[4/5] Though they’ve been around for eight years, Brooklyn’s French Kicks always manage to seem young, playing their tender post-punk that’s so pristine, it sounds fresh-scrubbed (if not exactly virginal) on every new effort. Better still, they’ve also eliminated their missteps as they age. On Two Thousand, that means avoiding the synth box altogether, in favor of artfully marrying ringing electric tracks with gentle acoustic numbers not unlike their borough brothers in Ambulance Ltd. As always, the Kicks’ parts-disaffected falsetto harmonies, sparse, chiming guitar lines and the probability of more than one Wire record in the CD player in the band’s van-make for an appealing album, highlighted by the download-now immediacy of “Knee High.” And though the rest of Two Thousand isn’t so perfect as, say, the Kicks’ cheekbones, it is the closest they’ve come to that kind of brilliance. (STARTIME INTERNATIONAL/VAGRANT) Tristan Staddon