If there's one way to make me have bad feeling towards someone, it's for them to badmouth Christianity. Add to that someone who badmouths Girls Aloud and we're talking handbags at dawn.
Add to that the fact singer Harry Collier was discovered by the brother of - NOOOOO! - Dido, and you might be forgiven for thinking that Kubb are indeed the work of Satan. Even their name's annoying!
We look at dreamy Harry, the lead singer, and we're meant to think "Ooo, he's a proper MAN-CUB - so fiery, yet so savagely vulnerable!" Whereas I just think he can't spell.
Kubb are a lot like those old "image is nothing" Sprite ads which, while pertaining to be hype-free, featured a trendy youth telling us this in a 100-per-cent-cool, inner-city black accent.
Similarly, Kubb position themselves as being dourly about "va music" but check all the image boxes. Someone once said pop music should be either sexy or profound and Kubb obviously think they're pushing both buttons, with their songs of drug addiction, depression and "f***ing your missus's brains out".
It's fair to say I went to see them "live" - though even the choice of this word seems like savage satire with some prejudice.
An embarrassing attempt to "work up" the audience with copious bursts of dry ice made me wish for The Darkness, because then at least you'd KNOW it was a joke.
The towels with which the singer mopped his brow every 15 minutes seemed to be "piling" it on to an extreme degree, as though Bruce Springsteen had just done a 12-hour shift in the New Jersey saltmines. They seemed 15 years too previous to be so sated and self-satisfied. Without wishing to pull rank, I have seen many a great pop act in their early days and what they all have in common is an appropriate nervousness, both playful and tense, a give-and-take, a courtship if you will, with their audience until, ahem, "two become one".
But this was like an arranged marriage - everything laid out on a platter. Frankly, I'll take a Girls Aloud smorgasbord any day.
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