ALBUM REVIEW: Kid Kapichi – ‘Fearless Nature’

Not to sound like a party-pooper, but people tend to forget that this current crop of alt-rock bands they’re so high on is still within The Industry. It’s great to get excited by good new music; having the fickleness of the machine working behind it obfuscated? Not so much. It’s especially true when you consider how many of them are here through min-maxing certain alt-rock fundamentals. Regardless of how cool and exciting they seem, it doesn’t automatically make them built to last.

Fearless Nature, almost beat for beat, rings as the prime example of a band about to hurled from mainstream rotation. It’s almost unrecognisable coming from Kid Kapichi, once purveyors of a lager-fuelled, Lacoste-clad variant of punk that typically unearthed a good lode of lightheartedness and cheeky humour. That’s all gone with this one, as is half of the band. It’s just frontman Jack Wilson and bassist Eddie Lewis now among their permanent ranks, a move preluded by a full touring regimen to presumably make the change feel more impactful and grand. What’s less talked about, however, is that the full old line-up did record this album. It’s just that the push of a ‘new era’ practically asks you to disregard that. What that truly means remains to be seen, but it’s a talking point to keep them going for a few steps more, if nothing else.

With all of that, there’s a predication that Fearless Nature isn’t any good, and…well, initially, there’s not much leaning towards the contrary. In fact, on a first listen, you’re almost left stricken by how severely Kid Kapichi have braked their own momentum. There Goes The Neighbourhood wasn’t the most pertinent of political manifestos, but the populism it filtered itself through was second to none. Fearless Nature, on the surface, has none of that. In fact, if you’re feeling particularly mean, you might just dismiss it outright as a beta version of a Fontaines D.C. album. Just take a look at it—heavier drums; an uncharacteristically slowed pace; a suite of bleaker post-punk templates that might be too shallow for their own good. They’re all here, and on the first couple of spins, they’re not too impressive.

The thing about Kid Kapichi, though, is that they’re experienced growers-on-you. It’s just in a new direction this time, the more arduous task of making this sort of guarded, closed-off material land. It can’t be stressed how distinctly unlike Kid Kapichi Fearless Nature is, and how its angle-shoot away from that norm is worn. This is closer to the feel of BIG SPECIAL’s more unshackled post-punk, or even the shaggy hard-lefts of late-period Blur. And when it clicks and you’ve got a wider selection of creative yardsticks than ever before—previously topped by Zombie Nation, a cod-ska collab with Madness frontman Suggs—the appeal is easier to grasp.

It does need to be underlined that this new direction is far from solved. Fearless Nature is very much the band still in a new adjustment period, shown in decisions that probably seemed better on paper. With its sawn-out guitar and rigid-to-point-of-near-aneurysm stance, Intervention is a bridge between Kapichis Old and New that’s capped too firmly in a mid range to satisfy either. Still, it’s a neat idea, unlike the tinny filter that smothers Wilson’s vocals on Saviour and produces physical pain with every misbegotten clip of the mix. With this one in particular, it’s almost like a conscious pivot towards robustly off-kilter post-punk that’s out of Kid Kapichi’s depth. Geese, they certainly ain’t.

But at the same time, there’s a hook to Fearless Nature that only becomes more pronounced upon added exposure. It comes from how Kid Kapichi are taking steps to diversify that embrace contrast, rather than stash it away and pretend it’s not there. That was ultimately the biggest issue with There Goes The Neighbourhood, an album that worked excellently for what it was doing, but represented a safe, (ironically) conservative next step. Here, a song like Shoe Size takes the catchphrased writing style of old and implants it a starker thematic context. No longer does Wilson give off a swaggering, wheeler-dealer personality type, instead paralysed by a crumbling mental state backdropped by a world that’s yet to get better. Leader Of The Free World is where the despondent spiral starts, moving inwards until coming to the shivering indie-rock soul-search Rabbit Hole.

It’s a refreshingly compound approach for Kid Kapichi that isn’t that standard for them. Going back to There Goes The Neighbourhood again, although that album had a prism of variety to its themes, you’d be hard-pressed to class them as ‘layers’ that complemented one another. Fearless Nature is better constructed in that regard, and a lot more cohesive. Its choices are explicitly deliberate—gaunt post-punk that hangs amid negative space, a representation of the void that’s to be survived, let alone fought through. Even on Dark Days Are Coming where the intent is spelled out with as little uncertainty as possible, its ominous lurch and patchwork squeals calling from the abyss make it a lot more evocative.

On top of that, Fearless Nature has the space to be a bit more adventurous in its directions. What some might see as a codified version of ‘proper’ post-punk can be more charitably interpreted as Kid Kapichi softening the boundaries between it and their usual Britrock home. They can lean in deeply, to their credit. A song like Patience, built from squawking vocal tracks, rattling drums and a brighter, quasi-bucolic little riff, just needs a little more self-satisfied smarm to fit the Home County aesthetic perfectly. More inherently appealing are the hard outer shell of Shoe Size that gestures almost in the direction of industrial music, and the deep, low slithers of Stainless Steel and If You’ve Got Legs.

For the swerve it takes, there’s a solid amount on Fearless Nature that turns out very credible, subject to the usual stipulation of Kid Kapichi’s material grabbing tighter upon subsequent visits. This is definitely a more difficult take on that, though. It’s not the ‘mainstream-friendly’ Kid Kapichi that’s brought them to their current heights, and to some, an insular, transparently transitional album just doesn’t hit the same. But speaking as a fan who firmly believes they’ve never released a bad album to date, watching them branch out and rebuild does hold value, even if where they are doesn’t map onto where they were. It’s worth taking the time to explore, if only to get a feel for what further growth is to come.

For fans of: Fontaines D.C., Blur, Soft Play

‘Fearless Nature’ by Kid Kapichi is released on 16th January on Spinefarm Records.

Words by Luke Nuttall