Day 131: INXS – Kick

Today’s choice came purely from wanting to plug a hole in my music knowledge. INXS sailed past me. I can name maybe two songs by them at a push, but I know absolutely nothing else. I always thought they were an early boy band pop group, but apparently they started off doing ska pop and new wave and pivoted to funk-tinged pub rock later on in their career. I am sorry, I was too young to know. To be fair, everything arrived in my country with about a 20 year delay before the internet so INXS should have been right on time, but alas.

Album cover courtesy of WEA

INXS was formed in 1977 by a group of school friends from Australia, and they were active until 2012. They’re one of the biggest-selling Australian acts of all time, having sold over 50 million albums. Their 1987 release Kick was the bands sixth studio album, which was their biggest seller to date and broke them fully into the international market.

I’ve got to be honest, I wasn’t sold in the beginning of the record. I thought it was a bit repetitive, nothing too special, lyrically okay but generally nothing to write home about. They did manage to claw it back and win me over fairly quickly. I think it was somewhere around ”Devil Inside,” a slightly dark, slightly camp, infectiously catchy song.

Occasionally you can hear the Motown and blues influences on the record and it’s a fairly unique mixture of songs and influences. Sometimes that’s to its detriment – some of the songs really do sound very good, but then there’s songs like “Tiny Dagger”, which just sounds like filler to me. On a few occasions, I find myself thinking that the saxophonist’s back must have been sore from carrying the song. “Kick” is probably my favourite of the bunch, as is “Never Tear Us Apart”.

Also, “Need You Tonight” is a banger. This is a completely half-baked though, but are people making sexy music like that anymore? You could maybe argue Sabrina Carpenter is, but she’s kind of just making wink wink nudge nudge sex joke music instead of actual horny yearner tunes. Someone who’s both a better writer and more capable thinker than me wrote about the sexlessness of cinema in their article titled “Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny” so I’m not even going to try to pontificate on this, but my working theory is that it’s also happening to music. I base this on about four minutes of thinking about it, might return to the topic later.

I’m not particularly enamoured by this album, there’s good songs and then there’s some that are less so. It’s very hit or miss for me. 6.5/10.