Review Summary: A gnarled, braying apprentice-piece
I have to say, I got into Tom Meighan as the Mad Hatter. It seemed as though with the simple act of donning the 10 shillings and sixpence and tapping into its uncanny knack for inciting 7th floor-quality songwriting the foursome native of Leicester qualified their hubris. With the sweep of 'West Ryder', which came dangerously close to completely reconciling Kasabian's equal affections for both the chorus and the abstract bridge, they had made solid their place in the ranks. That what makes the hatter mad is that his hat is full of lead is no matter. People are so distraught with the state of the art these days that madness is exemplary; extreme hedonism and self-aggrandisement are yours by right, not the domain of the wayward or purely insane.
Then, once you get past the flighty period pieces (which constituted most of the songs, remember; Meighan and lead guitarist Serge Pizzorno spent the entirety of the companion video to the album dissecting each song and exposing them as the hodgepodge melangés they were), you realise that that hubris is inherited. Inherited from their Britpop forebearers who left the seat scorching as they took their rise: Oasis. Now that Kasabian have the hubris, they're trying their hardest not to choke on it.
Meighan, on a neat little tangent, also does his best to ensure these songs strike hook-free. Gummy pop production holds him back, but it's in the deliberately spare atmosphere this album assumes that his weaknesses are most blaringly obvious. He lacks the versatility to imbue 'Days Are Forgotten' with the sexual acrimony it requires, and in turn the subtlety to make 'Let's Roll Just Like We Used To' truly seductive. Pizzorno, as tunesmith da capo, wastes chances; a song with a title as grand as 'La Fée Verte' should be an epoch unto itself, not a weak earwig of a Beatles pastiche. With ‘Velociraptor’ he’s gilding a tossed bubblegum wrapper (how else to describe a hook so daft with a tune so…well, awesome?).
He is, however, more purely coherent than before; ‘Goodbye Kiss’ and ‘Neon Noon’ smack of just the right amount of maturity tempered with a keenly begotten pop nous he could only have achieved through three albums of practice. He can’t salvage ‘Acid Turkish Bath’, though, as muddled and dreamily half-inspired half-hacked-off as its weird title implies. In an oddly contradictive way, though, that’s exactly what makes the tune so essential. Lyrically, too, it’s a belter, the first time any part of the record as a whole entity is totally compelling. Songs like ‘Switchblade Smiles’ might be home to perfect moments (in this case, the lone chorus where the band as a whole grinds the tune’s harmonic body), but ‘Velociraptor!’ is home to pressingly few perfect songs, in the meter of ‘Fire’ or ‘Processed Beats’. There’s certainly nothing falling for the exclusive ravine that ‘Where Did All The Love Go?’ harps in.
‘Man of Simple Pleasures’ is not the most indicative cut here, but is by some distance the most enjoyable. It’s a song of its word; a simple melody, a simple theme, a simple harmonic structure, a simple melancholy. And then with Impressionist candour it builds into something greater than the sum of its parts. There are smirks in that song, like there are in the dubby outpost of ‘I Hear Voices’ that suggest that Kasabian have yet to hit upon something truly definitive. The hubris strikes again. The inheritance is not something they need worry about. It is, in the long run, superfluous. The gift of the Mad Hatter was that only he understood his own riddle. If Kasabian peered inside their own, they might gift us with the sweetest madness of all.
