"Rock and roll and bright light don't mix," says Nick Stumpf. The gangly frontman of Brooklyn's French Kicks is about to lead his band into a rocker's worst nightmare: an outdoor, daytime gig under the most hideous of all lights, the sun. In the warm blush of the stage lights, Stumpf is a magnetic rock pinup, all arms and legs and strut. But in the daylight, he looks more like an art student who could use a sandwich.
"Outside gigs are not so fun," Stumpf admits. He seems kind of scared. "The sound is just gone immediately. It's just about impossible to really get into it."
Cut to an hour later, and Stumpf is doing the impossible: really getting into it. The brightness of the late afternoon and the vacuity of the open-air gig do not have much effect on the vocalist's animated carousing. As he flails around the stage, the guys behind him -- Matt Stinchcomb and Josh Wise trading off on guitars and synths, Stumpf's brother Lawrence on bass, and touring drummer Aaron Thurston -- motor through songs from the band's recently released The Trial of the Century without a hitch.
They start and stop on a dime, sing harmonies, play their asses off. Even though the audience of college kids is in the death grip of final exams, ultimately it's won over. Two hours after the band strikes its last note, the entire performance is available for download on a local peer-to-peer server. Listening to it later, you'd never guess it was played in the ugly light of day. The band is all about surviving under scrutiny, and these days, it's surviving a lot of it.
How'd French Kicks get here? Think back to 5 years ago to the spectacle that was the Brooklyn rock renaissance. Act 1 opened with the popular explosion of the Strokes, Interpol, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Walkmen and Liars (to name a few). The laundry list of flavor-of-the-week bands that sprung from the 4.28-square-mile borough seemed endless. They owned magazine covers and "saved rock and roll" with a cocktail of '60s punk (think Velvets) and '80s panache (think Joy Division). That's when the world was introduced to French Kicks.
The band was right in the middle of the parade and -- like most of its contemporaries -- saddled with nonsense descriptors: electroclash, post-no-wave, new new wave. But the kids gobbled that shit up, so by the time the curtain fell on retro rock's first installment, the collective consciousness of indie-rock consumers had squeezed itself into one great big "I (heart) New York" T-shirt.
Like a politician getting some distance from a scandal, Stumpf downplays his band's connection to its hometown's hype.
"I don't think location is that important, at least not to what we sound like," he says. "But we really don't think about it, either. We seem to be either traveling, playing shows or at home working on making records and doing our own thing."
Maybe true. Last year Stumpf and his bandmates were always on the road, tallying up more than 100 shows. But the French Kicks are still lumped together with the rest of the Brooklyn scene, one that was founded on a stylized retro obsession. What about electroclash? What about the chicks who show up to the parties in leg warmers and want to hear OMD records? Stumpf answers with a been-there-done-that dismissal.
