Kevin Bronson on June 27th, 2011

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The Troubadour was the least jaded place this side of Disneyland on Thursday night. Yes, the Kooks have a way of turning a room into the happiest place on earth, full of rosy-cheeked female admirers and shrieks right out of Beatles 1964. All you had to do was check your cynicism at the door, never a problem for the under-21 posse that frontman Luke Pritchard attracts.

The Brighton, U.K., quartet’s one-off show, while lousy for the Troub’s bar business, succeeded in stoking the fires for the band’s third album, “Junk of the Heart,” due Sept. 13 on Astralwerks. Judging from the half-dozen new songs in their 75-minute set – split evenly between new “Junk” and material from 2006’s “Inside In / Inside Out” and 2008’s “Konk” – the Kooks’ well of pop hooks and good-natured swagger is far from dry. Theirs is still scratchy Britpop that scratches a certain itch.

• ||| Photos by Debi Del Grande

“We spent three months in Los Angeles recording [the new album], so this feels like home,” Pritchard told the faithful before giving a shout-out to “Junk’s” producer, Tony Hoffer. It offered a rare breather from the foursome’s onslaught of wink-and-a-nod come-ons, all set to jagged, guitar-and-key bursts of ear candy that traces its lineage to the bands of the British Invasion decades ago but is more at home next to the melodic post-post punks of the last decade.

New songs such as “How’d You Like That,” “Mr. Nice Guy” and “Saboteur” play a little bit with typical pop arrangements, and the room rattled with a chorus of young voices during the sing-along for “She Moves in Her Own Way,” but for the most part the Kooks are not reinventing the wheel. They’re keeping it spinning, with Pritchard inviting you to fall for him, and imagine all those fireworks at the end of the night.