Otherkin - OK: An album review

If you Google 'Otherkin' and click on images, you might be a bit surprised. It's the internet. It's weird.

But at least it shows us that Otherkin, an rock band from Dublin, have a long way to go before they become a household name, which is undoubtedly what they'd like to do. They create rough, uncensored rock - and have just released their debut album - 'OK'.

The Irish punk outfit made their way unnoticed onto the scene in 2015, releasing ‘AY AY’ as their first single and ‘The 201 EP’ – and on the 29^th September this year, their full-length, 12-track album finally hit the shelves.

One of the beauties of Otherkin’s music is it’s stripped-back-ness. Yes, it’s 2017, and bands ‘experiment’, and we all love a bit of harmonica or a synthesizer here and there. But sometimes, there’s no need. The raw energy encapsulated in the souls of these four Irish lads is all that is required on the album. There’s no extra pianos, no glockenspiel’s – just guitars and snare drums, like a good old rock band should be.

The sound is somewhere between British 90’s music (think Oasis/She Sells Sanctuary by The Cult) and American skate-punk-alt-rock (i.e. Dinosaur Jr, Screeching Weasel). And it’s good. The songs are short, snappy and get the job done, with air-bending solos and thrashing power-chord-choruses galore in a record that’s just shy of forty minutes in length.

The band performing live

But like any album, there’s high points and there’s low points. AY AY, which the band initially released two years ago, is a bulldozing rock track that distances the band from the ‘indie’ label, the ‘bad smell’ that seems to follow all rock bands around these days. It’s got one of those riffs we all wish we could've conceived – but it’s here, in the flesh, and it’s what we want. The lyrics, with vocalist Luke Reilly wailing about his disdain at the state of record labels and the music industry, are clever and well-intertwined. It’s simple, two-chord stuff, but it works. It’s a tune that’d work well at a festival, with the loud, singalong chorus. But the unrivalled highlight of the song is the solo. It evokes memories of the intro lick in ‘Almost Ready’ by the aforementioned Dinosaur Jr, and the tone of the strings will have the world’s best air-guitarists drooling at the first listen.

Enabler, track seven, is another good song. It bursts in with a rough, crunching guitar part, made up of power chords and a FIFA-soundtrack-esque ad-lib (think Damien Carter – What World). The verse melody is a tasty sample of what the band can actually do when on top form, and the chorus is a relapse of the intro riff, head-banging and Royal-Bloody. It actually sounds much like some of the work of Welsh counterparts ‘Pretty Vicious.’ What’s important about this track is that the band incorporate lead guitar, with ostinato guitar licks behind the vocals and the rhythm, ala the Strokes. It’s a heavy, punchy, Red Bull-fuelled anthem about love. Do we want anything else from a rock song?

The final track on the album, ‘So So’, is probably the only other highlight. It starts with a minor-key, Nirvana – Bleach style opening riff, before a pre-verse instrumental that sounds like something off ‘Angles’ by the Strokes. It’s the longest song on the album at 5:20. But it seems to be the case that rather than balancing out their skills and adding an equal amount to the recipe of each song, they’ve dumped all their eggs in this basket and left none for the rest. But we’ll talk about the good bits first. It’s a melancholy number with a guitar track that we’ve only heard glimpses of from Otherkin so far. Laced with 7^th chords like those that the Arctic Monkeys made their own (505, Balaclava), the whole song is pretty reminiscent of ‘Favourite Worst Nightmare’, with the tone of the guitars and the dark-stormy-night atmosphere of the emotional lyrics. But half way through, the song breaks down and we’re hit with an unexpected electric-organ lick, ala Rammstein, which kicks back in during a bellowing coda. The album is rounded off in style with a billowing cloud of noise. It leaves you wanting more, but maybe that’s what the rest of the album was meant to do.

And that’s the problem.

The three songs I’ve mentioned are good. Very good, even. But a lot of album is a bit boring, flavourless, and leaves you wondering why it’s been included. Did they just throw it in cause they didn’t have another song?

Take ‘Feel It’, for example. The unpleasant, jumpy drum track is a poor start, before the lacklustre two chord riff comes to accompany. The tone of the guitar doesn’t really get you off your seat, and it sounds like a band who’ve just got together to play for the first time and don’t particularly know what to do with their instruments. The worst bit is it’s exactly like ‘Outtatheway’ by The Vines. Everyone loves a bit of inspiration, but not direct copying. The vocal melody is just a tarted-up version of the riff. Alright, it gets a bit better, but the piercing scream of ‘Feel it, I feel it’ midway through might make your ears bleed. It trundles along like a rusty wagon, and the only positive is that it only lasts for three minutes.

The two songs succeeding ‘Feel It’ aren’t much better. Maybe they thought putting the worst songs in the middle might shield them and make them unforgettable, or people would pass them over without noticing them. Let’s hope so.

‘89’ is a mishmash of what seems like three or four different songs, with a relaxing riff from the leaf of U2’s book, and it starts off fine, but it collapses into a jolty verse and you don’t really know where you at which point in the song. It’s like a bottle of lemonade that keeps fizzing up when you try to opening it.

‘Yeah, I Know’ is probably Otherkin’s most famous song. Once again, it’s anti-climactic, building you up with a spurring intro, but it just stops. There isn’t a specific chorus, and there isn’t much of a melody, it’s just rowdy, noisy and monotonal. And then there’s the White Stripes-inspired drumming. The drumming wasn’t the best bit of the White Stripes, if you don’t remember. Some, I’m sure, are a fan, but I’m certainly not.

Lyrically, it ain’t great. To start with, it’s hard to understand them, but that’s just his slobbish singing style. But for 50% of listeners, words are what will make the song, and I doubt the adage ‘I was born, and I will die’ will result in many tattoos or drunk emotional tweets. A lot of the time it’s a bit nonsensical and chanty, when they have it in them to do better. It’s clear that the words can mean something, as they do on ‘So So’ – and that when they do mean something, the singing seems a lot more passionate and less just like shouting.

If anything, Otherkin are a band you’d have to see live to appreciate fully. It isn’t technical stuff, but it’s thrashy, loud, and it’s rock music in a nutshell.

There’s work to be done, especially with the lyrics and overall song-writing. But with songs like ‘So So’, Otherkin make it clear that they have got the professional songwriting ability that can propel a band to hysteria. It’s just not visible all the time. ‘OK’ is a bit of an understatement. Maybe ‘In Progress’ would suit the description better.

6/10