Kicking off their U.S. tour last Wednesday, hailing from London, indie rock band the Kooks, played at the Observatory in Santa Ana, California on Sept. 24.
They debuted their brand new album, Listen, which had just dropped on Sept. 8 in the UK, and Sept.9 in the U.S. The show was opened by electro-pop band Priory from Portland, Oregon followed by Halsey, a female artist from New York whose music I would usually not have paid attention to and probably neither would have many Kooks’ fans, due to the very different genres.
However, Halsey’s performance really shocked the crowd, so much as to even hear them go “woahhh” as they first heard her vocals followed by the loud bass and synth drops.
The show began just past 8 p.m. and by 9:30 p.m. both artists had just finished their sets. What seemed like the longest intermission ever, the Kooks finally went on stage at 10 p.m.
Opening with an old track from Inside In/ Inside Out, ‘Eddie’s Gun’ had just the right amount of fast energetic guitar riffs and drumming to get the crowd up and dancing. Performing a total of 20 songs, they played many old tracks from albums, Inside In/ Inside Out (2006), Konk (2008), to their new album, Listen (2014), and unfortunately only one song, ‘Junk of the Heart (Happy)’, from their previous album also titled Junk of the Heart (2011).
They kept rotating from old tracks immediately followed by a new track. Bringing it back to 2006, with no surprises, they performed their most popular song ‘Naive’, in which they had every single soul in the venue singing word for word.
Halfway through their set, just after having finished a song the band leaves the stage, except for lead singer and guitarist, Luke Pritchard, who remained on stage. Pritchard begins strumming the cords to their acoustic song ‘Seaside’, stops, walks up to the mic, says, “I f**king love California”, and a second later begins strumming again followed by the words to the song which he performed alone.
Trying to leave the crowd in a joyful mood, they closed up the show by performing their song ‘Junk of the Heart’ or also known as ‘Happy’. The audience was insatiable.
The band had only just left the stage when the crowd started going wild for an encore, “ONE MORE SONG ONE MORE SONG”, then chants began to fade. The band then returned to the stage. Pritchard plops down behind an electric keyboard, begins to play new song, ‘See Me Now’ and moments later the rest of the band joined in with their instruments.
For the most part encores are only one song but apparently not for the Kooks. Right after ‘See Me Now’, they finalized the night by performing one last new song, ‘Westside’. And that was enough to leave the fans pleased until next time.
