There was a time when you could always rely on the Gallagher brothers to slag off the band of the moment in a bid to drum up free publicity for their latest music project and there was perhaps some source of comfort to be found in that.
But now it seems like every Tom, Dick and Harry (or is that Brandon, Johnny and Lily?) has resorted to these PR tactics, sticking the verbal dagger into their contemporaries and reaping the rewards in the form of tabloid coverage.
And you know things have reached a new level of absurdity when even Kaiser Chiefs, the good guys of indie pop, let rip on the entire indie scene. But unlike their calculated peers, the Leeds based five piece actually have a valid point.
Dismayed by the amount of glorified karaoke bands, drummer and chief songwriter Nick Hodgson recently told the NME: “There’s so much shit in guitar music at the moment. You imagine an A&R man seeing this bandwagon, jumping on it and signing any old shit with a guitar around its neck.
“Arctic Monkeys were the last of the best and we need something else now to get us out of it. Maybe it’s The Twang.”
Or maybe it’s Kaiser Chiefs? They did it in 2005 with the release of their debut album Employment which spawned the hits ‘I Predict a Riot’ and ‘Modern Way’.
And having reunited with producer Stephen Street (Blur, the Cranberries, the Smiths), they can do it once again with their much anticipated second album Yours Truly, Angry Mob.
They say:
Uncut: “Manages to be full of surprises while never straying too far from what you’d expect.”
NME: “A bold leap skyward from Employment.”
The Guardian: “Call this album their application for recognition as one of the decade’s major UK bands.”
We say:
Yours Truly… is a natural progression from Employment. The band still cram their songs with more choruses and hooks than Damon Albarn’s entire back catalogue, still make music for the masses, but the end product is clearly more mature and tight, introducing a new layer of depth to squelch any so called “novelty elements”.
And they have done so without losing their endearing sense of fun in the process. This is, if you like, a serious a kind of fun.
The album’s lead single ‘Ruby’ is a prime example of this, Ricky Wilson’s mixed signal romantic blues transformed into a festival flag waver thanks to the characteristically energetic musicianship on hand.
Likewise, ‘Highroyds’ betrays its tales of adolescent boredom and nuthouse location with adrenaline pumping, guitar crunching pop punk, while the short and sweet ‘Boxing Champ’, sung by Hodgson, is an insight into bassist Simon Rix’s formative years as a human punch bag dressed up as a dreamy piano lullaby.
Elsewhere, ‘Love’s Not a Competition (But I’m Winning)’ and ‘Try Your Best’ prove there’s more to Kaiser Chiefs than exuberant, head spinning Britpop version 2.0, both giving U2 and Coldplay a run for their money in the mobile phones aloft stakes.
All this and I haven’t even mentioned the tour de force that is ‘Learnt My Lesson Well’. “I can tell you now/There ain’t a problem that can’t be solved with a good old fashioned row,” Wilson sings all swagger like over a stomping rhythm that out Kinks Oasis’ ‘The Importance of Being Idle’.
No longer the cheeky garage band with pop star ambitions, t’Chiefs are now pop stars personified. Here’s to a lifetime of festival engineered euphoria.
Like this? Try these:
Blur – Parklife
Madness – The Rise and Fall
The Kinks – Face to Face
RELEASED
26th Feb ‘06
LABEL
B Unique/ Polydor
POSTED...
Sun 25 Feb 2007 at 6:19pm
