Kubichek - Not Enough Night (Album)

It’s staggering how quick and easy the Internet has made our access to an utter cavalcade of bands. Obviously this is a bit of a double-edged sword, because while we are now discovering artists we might not necessarily have had access to in years gone by, there is a very real danger that music eventually becomes something we stuff gluttonously and heedlessly into our ears simply because there are three other albums queued in our eMusic download manager which also need listening to this afternoon. If we’re consuming music like this, it is an unavoidable and regrettable side effect that innumerable great bands and albums will slip off the radar, which is pretty depressing if you stop to think about it.

Now, obviously, I’m not suggesting that lost classics are a new phenomenon, but the current industry model has shown us that no matter how wonderful the Internet revolution has been for music, there will always be great records which will be overlooked, it’s just that there are now loads more of them tantalisingly sat at the end of our fingertips. All of which brings me (reasonably) neatly on to our new feature, in which we will regularly focus on exactly that sort of album, a record which is dear to our hearts but for whatever reason isn’t as well known as we feel it ought to be.

If it wasn’t for a happy accident of geography which meant that Kubichek just happened to hail from the same part of England as me, there’s every chance that I might still be completely oblivious to Not Enough Night, and my life would be a tiny bit worse as a result. The band had been mainstays of the Newcastle scene for a good few years, having dissolved their previous incarnation and waded their way through gallons of record label shite before their debut album finally emerged in 2007, sounding far sharper and fresher than it had any right to given the slog they had endured to just get the thing made. Sadly Not Enough Night would prove to be Kubichek’s only album, a tantalising case of what might have been, but, God, what a beautiful corpse to leave.

The most enriching thing about Not Enough Night is the unrelenting pace at which the whole thing is delivered. For the majority of its forty or so minutes, the album is lived out at breakneck speed with both barrels aimed at pretty much everyone, from lairy Bigg Market meatheads (‘Taxi’) to “poetic friends” who “just wanna get their ends away” (‘Stutter’). Then you have ‘Hometown Strategies’ in which some poor small-towner is indignantly berated about being “too clever by half and too stupid to notice”. And don’t even get me started on the near-perfect headrush of album closer ‘Just Shut it Down’...

In less skilled hands the seemingly endless stream of spiky guitars and universal spitefulness could quite conceivably become tiresome, but there’s never really a danger of this occurring with Not Enough Night, simply because the sheer unadulterated energy it transmits is just so fucking primal that you can’t really stop yourself wanting to jump around your room shouting, or slam your foot as hard as you can on the accelerator.

While Not Enough Night’s primary function is unquestionably served as an arse-kicking rock record, there’s another interesting element to the album too, a more wide-eyed sense of feeling which only really rears its head on the odd occasions when singer Alan McDonald drops his snarl and the band gets lost in a gorgeous sea of instrumental bliss as it does on ‘Hope is Impossible’ and ‘Start as We Meant To’. This nod to the band’s very earliest recordings means that Not Enough Night appeals not only to the feet and loins but to the heart and head too. This extra dimension is a big factor in the album’s enduring appeal, to the point that it still finds as regular a home on my stereo as it did three and a bit years ago.