Review Summary: For Tomorrow: A Guide to Contemporary British Music, 1988-2013 (Part 89)
2005 must have been a really shitty year to be a member of The Futureheads. Here you are, sweating bullets trying to figure out a way to improve the song you perfected only a year earlier on your debut album, when along come these five clods from Leeds, rip your sound off, and outsell the pants off of you. Everywhere they went that year those Futureheads had to hear
Employment’s many, many hit singles and ask themselves “Why? Why?
Why?”
In fairness, Kaiser Chiefs probably didn’t set out to rip the Futureheads off. In these post-punk reviving times so many buzz bands shared the same influences (Gang of Four are patiently waiting for their royalty checks) but the two bands come so close in sound with such a vast difference in commercial fortunes it’s maddening to consider the circumstances that divided the two groups. As far as I can come up with, the only reason
Employment shipped gangbusters while
The Futureheads flopped is that it’s dumber. Dumber lyrics, dumber melodies, dumber harmonies, dumber chord progressions + bloopy keyboards = six times platinum.
But dumbness be damned,
Employment is the kind of record you throw on every couple of weeks when you need some unpretentious lug rock to holler along to. Actually listening to
Employment instead of just judging it from afar those crazy sales figures start to make more sense. Everyone who liked “Oh My God” fell for “I Predict a Riot” and “Everyday I Love You Less and Less” too, they all do the same bouncy lad rock with big hooks very, very well. “I Predict a Riot” and “Oh My God” both get slam-bang bridges that charge the songs up for their final choruses, repeating the extended “WOAAAAAHHHHHH” trick for maximum effect. Ricky Wilson throws himself into these songs with the kind of commitment that suggests he either really believed nobody had done it like this before or he didn’t care.
Employment’s best songs are obvious, with the exception of “Na Na Na Na Na”, they’re the singles. Outside of those, nothing offensively bad but nothing mind blowing. It’s solid rock that tapped that eternal Oasis vein of Brits who want to participate in youth culture but don’t want to be particularly challenged.
The Kaiser Chiefs came
this close to not blowing it. They followed the smash success of
Employment with an honest-to-god number one single (“Ruby”) but the album it came from (2007’s
Yours Truly, Angry Mob) couldn’t produce a worthy follow-up. Still, for the duration
Employment makes for an effective post-punk revival introduction. Just make sure you trade up
Employment for
Entertainment! at some point.
