By now we’ve become used to new bands arriving in a blaze of their own hyperbole, but even still Leicester’s Kasabian do seem to fancy themselves a fair bit.
Before we’ve even heard a note there is talk of a wake up call for British music, catching the moment and – most bizarrely – a serpent rising from the sea and scaring away all the pirates. Quite. So the talk has been talked; has their debut got the proverbial walk? Well, sort of. Kasabian are a band of anomalies. Inspired to form a band by Britpop, they dismiss all indie music as crap.
Defiantly rock‘n’roll in attitude, their output is almost exclusively electronic. And for all their yakking about saving the music scene, they have adapted much of what has gone before – bits of dance music, Primal Scream and Happy Mondays; practically all of the Lo-Fidelity Allstars. Yet despite it all, Kasabian are actually capable of being exciting as they claim.
The first half hour of their debut simply flies at you out of the speakers, a whirl of snotty vocals, computerised and human beats and effects laden synths. The two singles ‘Processed Beats’ and ‘L.S.F.’ stand out, but it all marks them down as being at least as much trousers as mouth.
Disappointingly, it proves to be too frantic a pace to maintain. The album tales off badly in the final third – and at 13 tracks in total, they could have easily dispensed with it altogether – as the band paint themselves into a corner that they can’t really get out of. Some of the keyboards start to sound a bit too much like Jean Michael Jarre for comfort, the lyrics become vague and you feel that they’re just not quite capable of pulling one more surprise out of the air.
Maybe the expectations were simply a little too high, but then no-one is more to blame for that than Kasabian themselves.