KINGDOM COME
Second time around, the songs match the swagger.
Kasabian – Empire – BMG
★★★★☆
The video for Empire’s title track is as bold and blunt as the band that made it. Kasabian singer Tom Meighan is portrayed leading his merry men, all clad in Napoleonic Wars-era British army uniforms, across the battlefield to confront the general who’s presiding over a bloodbath. One by one, Kasabian get shot and parallels with current events are made explicit come the chorus: “It’s happening again”.
Like the band’s Gallagher-esque interview technique, it isn’t the subtlest of protests. Thankfully, neither is its soundtrack. The song is all hammering glam beats, insistent riffing and burning melody, with Meighan singing like a hybrid of Bobby Gillespie and Liam Gallagher, with a dash of Happy Mondays’ Shaun Ryder. These are loaded influences to be playing with, of course, leading more often to defeat than flag-waving victory. Not this time.
2004’s self-titled, 700,000-selling debut was a frequently thrilling listen, but as a whole left questions hanging about Kasabian’s tunes-to-bluster quota. Empire bypasses such concerns by presenting not so much songs as sustained bursts of excitement, rich in confrontation and communality.
It’s significant that underneath the Rolling Stones swagger – see Me Plus One’s radio-friendly singalong – is such an intricate architecture of synthetic noise. The music has its antecedents, for sure. Sun/Rise/Light/Flies is not unlike the Chemical Brothers/Noel Gallagher collaboration Let Forever Be, which was itself a homage to The Beatles’ Tomorrow Never Knows, but is as exhilarating as it is insistent.
The semi-acoustic British Legion, sung by guitarist Serge Pizzorno, is the exception to the album’s rocking dub-disco rule, but its lighters-aloft refrain of, “We’re gonna make it through” is a last chance to feel safe and warm before the vengeful The Doberman hitches a ride out on apocalyptic mariachi trumpets and church bells.
Naysayers may write this off as a derivative mash up of early-’90s indie moves, but on Empire Kasabian have become bigger than the sum of their record collections. And in a climate dominated by singer-songwriters and jangly guitar purists, this electronic rock’n’roll band sound positively indestructible. Prepare to be annexed.
DOWNLOAD: Sun/Rise/Light/Flies, Empire, Stuntman, Last Trip (In Flight), British Legion
FURTHER LISTENING:
Primal Scream – Vanishing Point
CREATION, 1997 ★★★★
