How does it come to pass that a band with a live show that is capable of rocking any house you care to put them in can manage to produce such a disappointing first album? This is a question I’ve been asking myself while I’ve been considering what to tell you all about Kora’s debut album. It’s not a bad album as such, but you wonder where the passion and energy of the live show got to in the recording process.

The album starts with a track called Intro which oddly, is a cinematic affair with massed voices and orchestral strings and brass. If I’d wanted Ennio Morri-Kora-ne, I would have asked for that by name (what I was expecting, and what you get in the rest of the album, is a mix of funk, roots, and rock). Equally oddly, the album features two other ‘tracks’ which are really just short audio stings, and don’t explicably fit into the structure of the album. There are other tracks, most notably Down the Road, where the band seem unsure which raod they should take. The album was self-produced, and it may be that they could have used some outside assistance in the process of ensuring that they had enough musical ideas to sustain a whole album.

However, when things do come together, they come together. The album’s second track Burning, with which Kora start their live show, is the highlight of the album; slightly more mannered on record than live, but still with enough skank in it to get your feet moving (as does the wonderfully named Skankenstein). It’s not all biffo though; another highlight is the whimsical The Delivery Man that tells the tale of Sam, who delivers goods and cuckolds husbands, all in a day’s work.

Another matter worthy of mention is the gloriously detailed manga-style artwork of the liner booklet. It often strikes me as odd as a reviewer that so much of what we receive comes in the form of CDRs in plastic sleeves – you have to figure that people who are buying CDs are interested in the whole physical experience, which you can’t get from a download, and when the physical side is as impressive as this one is, it behoves the reviewer to offer proper respect.

I did try inviting 50 people round to my place to jump up and down in my living room and drink beer while listening to this album to see whether recreating the live experience improved things. It did, but not by much. I’d highly recommend going to see them live to make up your own mind; you are much more likely to become a fan if you see them live first. And hopefully that by the time they make their next record, they’ve found some way to bottle the essence of exactly what they’ve missed here.