Kasabian, 'Kasabian'

Picture the scene. You’re in a position of power at a record company. A meeting is scheduled between yourself and a bunch of British chancers who have named themselves after Charles Manson’s getaway driver. Of course you take the meeting, regardless of whether you passionately believe in the band or not because, well, they’re on your label. The outcome of the meeting? The band tells you that they’re planning to record their debut album – for which you’re stumping up the cash – at their rural farmhouse headquarters. What’s more, “it’s going to be the best f**king debut album of all time”. Ask yourself, what would you do?

Here’s what RCA Records did: they immediately agreed (though surely felt the need for a lie down afterwards) and Kasabian holed themselves up in their – by now, infamous – commune and delivered an adventurous, accomplished, daring debut. Before the praise, a slight word of warning: this album is not the second coming (an irony that shouldn’t be lost on the band nor their heroes the Stone Roses who named their long awaited follow-up exactly that) but can sit alongside, or more realistically slightly below The Roses’s first album, Primal Scream’s ‘Screamadelica’ and D.J Shadow’s ‘Endtroducing…’.

Baggy beats and trippy rock is the order of the day. Lead singer and, for a while, the planet’s most opinionated man Tom Meighan (he labeled The Strokes’ Julian Casablancas as a “posh f***king singer”) clearly gets off on this “us versus the world” manifesto. Straight from the off with dance floor and bedroom classic ‘Club Foot’ the listener learns that, “We’ve got our backs to the wall/Watch out/They’re gonna kill us all”. And this is a fairly timid lyric. Regardless of whether you’re on drugs when you listen to ‘Kasabian’ (the band, you sense, just might have been during the farmhouse recordings…) the foggy haze is simply inescapable. ‘Pinch Roller’ ‘Butcher Blues’, ‘Orange’ and ‘U Boat’ are four such examples. More mainstream material comes from the Happy Monday tribute that is ‘Processed Beats’ and Kasabian truly start to find their own voice on the naggingly addictive ‘L.S.F’, enthusiastic ‘Reason Is Treason’ and haunting ‘Ovary Stripe’, remarkable for not containing Meighan’s vocal. These early pointers suggest that Kasabian might be referenced as an important influence by tomorrow’s bands. Better get back to that farmhouse.