CD REVIEW Kaiser Chiefs-Yours Truly Angry Mob

What is happening to lad rock? Ten years ago the chances of a new album coming out of Britain two parts boozy arrogance to one part guitar pop classicism was as dependable as MTV subtitles on a Liam Gallagher interview. But those salad days are gone, and Britpop is suddenly finding itself mired in, out of all things, maturity. The standard bearers for this new development are the Leeds quintet The Kaiser Chiefs. With more an affinity for quirky melodies in the XTC and The Madness mold than your average Mancunian street urchin, the album sounds like art students trying their best to rock out like a garage band. The material is tastefully tuneful, each song with a playful melody courtesy of Ricky Smith, whose vocals split the difference between Morrissey and Damon Albarn. Suitably, the producer is Stephen Street who gives this album the radio ready sheen of Strangeways Here We Come and Parklife. But where those two albums jumped off the plastic with colorful tales of girlfriends in comas and bulldozing houses, too often the Kaiser Chiefs are content with beige. The lyrics are a studied attempt at ladisms like drinking and fighting and drinking and love and populism, which work for the most part. But the pseudo title track threatens to put the reputation of the British working class back a century with a chant of “we are the angry mob/we read the papers everyday/we like who we like/we hate who we hate/but we are so easily swayed.” The band is at it’s best when they drop all pretenses and masks and sound like they have no idea what they are doing. The first single, “Ruby” does it when the best stuttered chorus since Bachman Turner Overdrive explodes out the speakers, and single handedly drags the album to number 1 in England. That same ethos is there in the bridge of “Everything is Average Nowadays,” when Smith sloppily sings along with Andy White’s guitar. But the band still sounds more at home backed by a mellotron choir on the gentle ballad “Try Your Best” than their more ruckus raking excursions. Hopefully the future brings either a sloopy and boozy Kaiser Chiefs or an unabashedly arty Kaiser Chiefs, because the combination is already seeming cynical the second time around. At least I still have the Arctic Monkeys to give me wildly inconsistent albums to remind me why Britpop sucks and rules simultaneously.

7/10