The first time I heard ‘Club Foot’, I got really quite excited. I thought that this was a band who really had something. It was that certain, indefinable quality, encapsulated in something urgent yet at the same time swaggering. It was simultaneously vintage and perfectly contemporary. I was immediately convinced that they would be huge. I was, of course, right, although by the time the debut album emerged, my enthusiasm had already waned.
The formulaic ‘Shoot the Runner’ and attendant album ‘Empire’ did little to reignite my interest, then long came ‘Fire’. I first heard it without knowing who it was, and thought it was perhaps a new band who showed potential but really needed to develop their own style more, rather than aping late 60s rock, complete with super-cliche imagery. It only went downhill from there, and I began to abhor Kasabian. As much as anything, it was the attitude: in interviews, the bragging about being the most amazing rock ‘n’ roll band seemed little short of delusional, because, like Oasis, they simply didn’t have the music to substantiate the breathtaking arrogance. Musically, it was pretty ordinary-sounding, and lyrically so lazy as to be contemptible. But, like Oasis, the masses were rabid for it. They believed the band’s hype, who in turn believed their own hype. It’s said that a picture speaks a thousand words, and if ever an album cover was the visual equivalent of an epistle on a band so far up their own arses as to believe that the crock of shit they’d just churned out in a drug-addled haze was pure, solid gold, it was ‘West Pauper Lunatic Asylum’. In fact, their album covers follow a trajectory, from the sharp, striking stencil style of the debut, with its implications of musical guerilla tactics, toward an increasingly extravagant self-indulgence.
Subsequently, try as I might to avoid them, it’s proven impossible to avoid Kasabian. Flicking through the NME one lunchtime, I was assailed by the quotations lifted from the interview, in which they claimed that the forthcoming fourth album was a ‘classic’ and would ‘change people’s lives.’ Somehow, I didn’t believe either of these statements, and figured I didn’t need to hear the release to justify my opinion.
The ‘Velociraptor!’ artwork does suggest a return to their roots, being altogether simpler, less ornate, less opulent: could it be that they’ve been moved by these turbulent times and feel some urge to reconnect with society? That they’re compelled to demonstrate their solidarity with the disaffected youth of the nation? Somehow, I don’t think so: it seems more likely that they’ve gone back to the beginning simply because they’ve run out of new ideas.
As if to demonstrate the paucity of their ideas and abject inability to develop beyond such very narrow confines of rock heritage, not least of all their own, lead single ‘Days Are Forgotten’ rehashes the chorus of ‘Club Foot’ for its verse, bringing some kind of Red Indian vibe to the ‘aaahs’ which are now ‘wooohs’, slinging in some wah-wah and lobbing in a mid-pace pseudo-anthemic chorus. It’s probably the best track on the album.
Much of the material is a mix of ‘vintage’ rock trappings and all things Mancunian, and as such, holds few surprises, and the incorporation of vintage britpop elements simply come across as an attempt to rewrite Oasis’ ‘Don’t Believe the Truth’. Don’t believe the hype would be more appropriate, as they still manage to pack in plenty of pretence and overblown bollocks. The album commences with a gong, for fuck’s sake, before the pseudo-Beatles ‘Let’s Roll Just Like We Used To’ crams in a heap of bombastic strings that completely undermine the nostalgic reverie of the lyrical content. The applause at the fade simply sounds like so much self-congratulation. Yeah, well done. It’s a song. Get over it.
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And then there’s the title track. It sounds like a disco remix of a Fall outtake, and boasts (although really, there’s nothing to brag about) some of the most abysmally dashed-off lyrics I’ve heard in a while, with the lamentably lame chorus line ‘Velociraptor! He gonna hurt ya, he gonna kill ya, He gonna eatcha!’ Ooh, I’m trembling! The theme to Godzilla, back in the 80s, was scarier by miles.
The string-laden dramatics of the six-minute ‘Acid Turkish Bath (Shelter from the Storm)’ are as overblown as you like, and are interwoven with the kind of pseudomystical bullshit that people still scoff at Kula Shaker for. The thing is, sweeping strings in rock are so 90s, man. Remember Manic Street Preachers’ ‘Everything Must Go’ and Mansun’s first two albums? Kasabian don’t so much reheat those ideas as dish them up again, luke-warm and dried-up after a decade on a hot-plate, and serve them with a side-order of stupendously crap half-baked lyrics.
‘Man of Simple Pleasures’ manages to take elements of The Verve and Arctic Monkeys to produce something that’s little more than a tepid sub-Oasis plodder that trudges through the motions without suggesting any kind of emotional engagement. ‘Switchblade Smiles’ again revisits ‘Club Foot’ and ‘Processed Beats’ with reduced impact and zero urgency.
Guitar in one hand, penis in the other, Sergio and the boys have penned an album that’s listenable, but sloppy and indulgent despite it’s poppier leanings, and it’s abundantly clear that there’s a galactic disparity between the album they’ve produced and the album they’re so convinced they’ve produced. Life-changing it isn’t. The truth is, it’s largely forgettable, and I’d wager that they’ll be about was well-remembered as The Farm another five to ten years hence. The point is, that whether I’m right or wrong in this assumption, Kasabian will always be doomed to failure, because they will never fulfil their ambitions. They can’t be Mancunian, however much they might make like they are, and they’ll never be anywhere near as good as they think they are.
Given the choice of listening to ‘Velociraptor!’ or chewing a monkey brain, I’d not need to give it a second’s thought...
Kasabian Online
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