Kasabian: s/t
Flippin' 'eck, lads, talk about a statement of intent.
Imagine you are gliding through irridescent layers of space dust and stars like that bit at the beginning of every Star Wars film where the plot outline slices through the galaxy and gets progressively harder to read... then... BANG! Vader's monstrosity of a ship slams your weedy little rocket straight in the nose and sends it wheeling off into oblivion. That, I am guessing, must be very similar to the introduction of 'Club Foot', Kasabian's choice of apocalyptic first track, followed immediately by 'Processed Beats', owning a bassline so tough and raw it almost drips blood all over the meat counter.
There's definitely a thick streak of brutality running through this record, not least in the screeching, eerie blitz of 'I.D.'. With titles like 'U Boat', 'Butcher Blues' and 'Reason Is Treason', there's an oppressive sense of a suffocating, sinking society at war in which music is not just an escape or a comfort blanket but also an explosive bomb in the face of authority.
Losing its way slightly in tame (by comparison) tracks 'Running Battle' and 'Test Transmission', Kasabian's debut may not quite live up to their own inflated self-belief and sweary, swaggering proclamations along the lines of being the best thing since the Big Bang, but, with time, these Leicester boys may become the leaders of a movement bigger than you can shake a stick at.
In places base and animal, with severed cymbals, deep, thumping drums and earthquakes for basslines, in other areas lifted into the future with floating electronics panning from speaker to speaker, Kasabian aren't afraid to explore. Samples and beats are manipulated to the extreme, giving an adventurous feel to an album whose veins pump with ideas.
Kasabian certainly know how to build up tension and they do this to an almost painful and unbearable extent on 'Ovary Stripe', in which a piano gets its bottom octaves massacred mercilessly over an evil drone whilst a taut guitar trips about and then an army of skewed strings create a slipping avalanche of suspense over the top.
This record is shaking with the cold chill of modern paranoia and tainted with hidden threat (the band's masked terrorist logo is an ever-more-disturbing reminder of the uncertainty and instability of our surroundings) but, ultimately, you're not gonna scramble and hide under the bed when it's playing. You're gonna want to get up and dance like a loon, and for a very long time at that.
It's both a resistance to and a document of the industrial, choked, polluted world of cold metal and smoking guns we live in. It's also a powerful display of a band ready to fight for what they believe in. Very good. Or, as Kasabian might put it, fucking very fucking good.
Find related articles: bottom octaves, reason is treason, explosive bomb, self belief, comfort blanket.
