EMPIRE

Kasabian (album)

Second albums, eh? Difficult territory, especially if your debut did its job and got you noticed. Of course, if you start off with a successful album, you’ve basically got two choices. Try and do exactly what it was that worked before all over again and risk boring your fans silly or you could say “Stuff the lot of you, we’re going to do an album we like and if you like it as well, that’s just a bonus”. Empire starts off with the title track which is great, but which I’ve also already reviewed so I shan’t go over old ground. Still, it’s a good start and the next song, Shoot The Runner sounds like something that’s somehow managed to escape from the Glam Rock Hell of the 1970s, but where most bands would settle for recreating the glory days of T. Rex and Sweet, that would be too easy for Leicester’s finest (yes, even better than Showaddywaddy). Instead, about halfway through the track briefly decides to try its hand at early eighties synthpop before reverting to type, only this time with so much going on in the background it’s a bit difficult to keep track. That pretty much sets the tone for the rest of the proceedings – because things change so quickly during the course of the album, you never quite know what’s going to happen next. Apnoea is the sort of mad big beat monster that the Chemical Brothers have forgotten how to do, Stuntman goes along at a pace that can best be described as “relentless” and if it’s not a future single somebody needs to have a word with their record company, but the entire album is loaded with good ideas used at the right time. Proper instruments like guitars, drums and anything else that happened to be lying around sit happily alongside computers and drum machines and although the album has a slightly dark edge to it, it’s not all up and at ’em music, British Legion in particular showing that if needed, Kasabian can strip everything down to basics and not throw in any uneccesary extras just for the hell of it. It’s also impossible to tell the potential singles from the album tracks, which is just how it should be. Now, if you ask me, the sign of a great album is a final track that makes you want to sit back for a couple of minutes just so you can reflect on what you’ve just heard. Do you know what, I’m going to add The Doberman to the list and all. It’s deliberately epic, far and away the longest track on the album, sounds as though it was intended to finish the album from the very beginning of its existence and it changes direction more often than an episode of 24 – it’s even got trumpets. I haven’t yet heard a better album this year, that’s how good this is.

SOMETHING ABOUT YOU

Jamelia

They say a change is as good as a rest, whoever “they” are. Mind you, to begin with there’s very little sign of what’s to come. You’ve got the bass, the beats that are just there to mark time and don’t actually drive the song forward and you’ve got Jamelia doing what she’s paid to do, namely sing. So far, so very R&B and not really that far removed from the days of Thank You and Superstar. After the first verse however, the entire landscape changes. It sounds like a band of session musicians who secretly want to be world famous rock stars were wandering past the recording studio as Jamelia was singing the first verse, liked what they heard, one of them said the others “Lads, our time has come” and en masse, they steamed into the recording studio, set up their kit and started rocking out as only anonymous session musicians can. That’s what it sounds like – a band trying to go all out but just lacking that little spark to make this really good. Jamelia was aiming for “This is going to blow you away”, but instead she’s ended up closer to “More tea, vicar?”.