Giles lives in Edinburgh, with wife Susan and two children. A Senior Technical Design Authority for ...
Giles lives in Edinburgh, with wife Susan and two children. A Senior Technical Design Authority for a major IT company, he loves watching motorsport, developing giles-guthrie.com, cooking, eating and photography. Could use there being more hours in a day.
Member since:18.05.2005
Reviews:16
Kasabian are a four-piece from Leicester, in the UK. This, their self-titled debut album, is a contender for "Album of 2004", which is saying something, because that was also the year in which the brilliant Hopes and Fears (Keane), Antics (Interpol) and Hot Fuss (Killers) were released, amongst others. Definitely a class year, and yet Kasabian fits straight in.
The opening track, Club Foot is a good harbinger for the album. It's really difficult to describe it (or indeed any of the songs) without using the word "fuses". But this is exactly what it does, bringing together 1980s synth pop with 1990s Indie rock to form a guitar track that is heavily distorted, and overlaid with synth strings. It helps of course, that this is a very high-energy track that opens the disc with tremendous verve before all-but ingesting itself to pave the way for Track 2, Processed Beats. This is brilliant ordering. Processed Beats is another combination of styles, but relies heavily on an out-of-phase unplugged guitar together with an insistent drum line to which it is impossible not to tap toes. It gets funky, and there's a real feeling of Stone Roses to the track.
Fans of Playstation 2 driving game Gran Turismo 4 will immediately recognise Reason is Treason since it is the theme to said game, although not in the version that makes up Track 3 (that version is "hidden" at the end, some 4 minutes after the end of U Boat). It's a continuance of the style mashing, high energy theme, but it also contributes to the overall feeling that Kasabian are in fact great song constructors, with a proven ability to use changes of pace and style to emphasise a song's virtues rather than as a cynical extension device.
Later on in the disc, things start to become really interesting. There are some "interlude" tracks, such as Track 6, Orange that seem not to really serve any purpose. It's not as if they change the mood or the pace, since the follower is in keeping with the rest of the disc. It's as if Kasabian have aspirations to make movie soundtracks - a thought which replays throughout the later tracks, which move more toward aural sculpture than being songs in themselves. Some of the instrumental breaks in Lost Souls Forever would not be out of place in the score of a sci-fi movie, although your reviewer does concede that this may be an impression garnered from listening to the album at the same time as reading Iain M. Banks's science-fiction work The Algebraist!
Track 7, Running Battle is slower, more insistent, and also more sinister than its predecessors, but it does reveal the huge influence that drums have on the album, since it is really the drum line that stitches the song together, as in other tracks. Track 8, Test Transmission carries with it a huge Stone Roses/The Verve influence, before leading us to one of the other "spacers", Pinch Roller. Cutt Off is next, a strong contender for best track of the whole album. It also perhaps best encapsulates the band and their style, carrying an excellent variation of pace and style, and with an unexpected disco instrumental at the end.
Ovary Stripe is another "soundtrack-friendly" instrumental, and leads us to the end, which is a double, in the form of the named track U Boat, and a hidden new version of Reason is Treason. Quite why bands do this is something of a mystery to your reviewer, but there you go. A decent MP3 editor makes short work of splitting the track and removing all the silence… U Boat itself is a melancholy affair, and finishing the album (ahem) with this is perhaps not the wisest move, although it does show Kasabian to be quite a contemplative outfit. The later inclusion of the uplifting Reason is Treason changes this though, revealing an intelligence, an ability to vary, and a new creative style that is easy and interesting to listen to. A collection of very good songs coming together to form a great album. Class.
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Advantages: A superb album, with swagger, great vocals, invention, clever melodies, and powerful rhythms Disadvantages: It took me so long to find them...
jonwebb5 24.06.2009 ·
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Review of Kasabian - Kasabian
Advantages: Plenty of mood, plenty of groove. Intensely atmospheric. Disadvantages: Too much like the Stone Roses. Slightly samey and pretentious- too much electronic wizardry.
thomlafferty 04.10.2004 (04.10.2004)
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Review of Kasabian - Kasabian
Nov 22nd, 2005
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