If the music industry needs one thing, it’s stereotypes. For every Radiohead that evolves with each album which leads fans into a uninhibited frenzy of curiosity and intrigue and for every Lady Gaga who’s manufactured yet unpredictable, kooky persona leaves journalists wondering what she’ll do next in terms of dressing up rather than actual musical quality, there needs to be a counterbalance in terms of predictability to keep the world from self-destructing…or something.
Point being; for years Oasis was the staple of echoing every stereotype imaginable under the rock and roll banner, proudly exclaiming the copious amounts of drugs taken, the infighting, the banter which could be used for an excuse of why they hadn’t produced a decent album from 1995 all the way to 2008.
But now Oasis is gone and Beady Eye are shambolic, Noel’s solo efforts thus far sounds good and downplayed which is possibly the best combination he could use for promotion and Viva Brother’s debut was so terrible, it matched Glasvegas in terms of unoriginal, puerile rubbish.
So it falls on Primal Scream cover band Kasabian to remind us what we’re missing out on. That the self proclaimed “last rock and roll band” can still remind us that creating music with guitars needs to be equalled with quotes the press can use to keep you in the public eye…I mean, show your well ‘ard and fuck the University Challenge bands because they’re all cunts!
Ok, ok, harshness aside, I like Kasabian and I don’t mean I just like their singles. I fount them to be a consistently solid if slightly samey band with some great stand-out tracks which incorporated great guitar riffs and atmospheric electronic soundscapes and even album tracks such as The Doberman, West Ryder/Silver Bullet and Stuntman proved the band could do more than simple 3-4 minute tracks with the same verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus formula.
So when Velociraptor! (which probably wins the award for album title that should have been used years ago) was announced, I was looking forward to it because if Kasabian could guarantee anything; it would be an album that had possibly one or two fantastic singles and possibly a few tracks that wouldn’t suit airplay but would suit random playlists and further cement Kasabian as a band that deserved to trump it’s own horn without the sniggering and disdain Oasis earned.
But alas, the inevitable comedown has arrived and boy howdy, it’s not so much a fall from grace; but a plummet from the highest plane on to a school of orphaned children.
Opening track Let’s Roll Like We Used To begins with French horns and random groans before going into a track that’s part Austin Powers, part Britpop. It’s a decent track with a good hook for a chorus and probably one of the album’s stronger moments but it pales compared to the preceding album’s opening numbers.
Lead single Days Are Forgotten follows up with a drum and bassline straight out of The Stones Roses back catalogue and would have been far better if they just trimmed the excessive fat and added a bit more variation. At over five minutes, it goes on for far too long despite the early intrigue and is one of the few songs to have a better radio edit than the original album version.
Goodbye Kiss is the popiest track on the entire record featuring themes similar to Where Did All the Love Go?. Strings and easy on the ears guitar, it’s one of the more accessible tracks and goes on for just long enough without outstaying it’s welcome.
La Fée Verte comes next as a love letter to The Beatles with lyrics nodding to Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and other vivid imagery. It’s nothing new as it’s basically Where Did All the Love Go? again but with the Lennon/McCartney influence notched over 9000. It’s out of place on the record but one of the only decent stand alone song’s if once again, far, far too long.
Title track Velociraptor! is short, lyrically plain and nothing new on an album which can’t find it’s ground. Think Last Trip on Empire with samples of electronic drums but lacking the hard rock edge.
Acid Turkish Bath (Shelter from the Storm) marks the midpoint of the album with strings and loud drums at the beginning before fading into something that wouldn’t sound out of place on The Boxer Rebellion’s latest album. It eventually changes back and forth through different samples and different themes, but it only comes across as confused and at six minutes, like Days Are Forgotten, it’s a needlessly long song that attempts to mix epicness with track length and fails.
I Hear Voices takes us into the second half of the album. Consisting of a synth which sounds like a left over from Kasabian’s first album (and of all things; Red Weed from Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds), an electronic drum beat and a steady bass. It’s a song that seems to fall back on lyrics which Kasabian have never really been acclaimed for and is average at best.
Re-wired is a generic rock and roll number with more boring lyrics, a bridge with more French horns but screams for something big and bombastic to fill the time and goes through the same formula of rinse and repeat way beyond the bearable point. Just when you think it’s over, it goes into a random string section which while nice, sounds like a desperate plea to justify wasting five minutes of your life.
Man of Simple Pleasures is basically Re-wired again but lacks the string section and instead goes to simple song formula mentioned earlier. Relatively harmless but ultimately pointless.
I wasn’t a fan of Switchblade Smiles when I first heard it but on the record, it sounds much better. Not because it all finally comes together and suits the back drop the other tracks had established but because compared to all but a few moments preceding it, it sounds interesting and grabs your attention.
In short, the meaner, synth filled relative to Vlad the Impaler with an excellent bassline and loud electronic drums. In retrospective, if the album was made of eleven of these, I’d be complaining that although it’d be samey, the album would at least be entertaining.
Neon Noon finishes the album with a sombre acoustic guitar, a synth solo that sounds suspiciously like Pinch Roller (which for you fact hunters, is one of my favourite Kasabian tracks) and finally adds drums to make another song that’s part Beatles for vocals, part Primal Scream and again, part Jeff Wayne. Altogether; a slow fade out that once again, goes on for ages for reasons unknown.
See, I never thought I’d say this but; Velociraptor!’s biggest flaw is it’s boring. It’s one of the most mind-numbingly boring records of the year. The band that has Club Foot, Shoot the Runner, Fire and Reason is Treason under its proud belt have somehow made a record that has few highs but stays relatively shy, slow and worst of all; generic.
It’s a new sound that doesn’t suit the band and for all the swagger going into the record, it simply doesn’t hold up. Tracks go on for too long at a snail’s pace, out of context and on their own they don’t hold a candle to previous hits, there’s a distinct lack of decent riffs to break up the mediocrity and for a band that can’t fall back on ingenious lyrics which makes the music all the more important, it’s simply not good enough.
It’s nice to see the band branch out to new horizons and they deserve credit for at least trying something new, but as an album, it fails miserably. It’s an album that should have incorporated the stereotypes of rock and roll in one glorious package to stand against albums that are weird for the sake of being weird but instead, like the album’s namesake; it’s an uninspiring, insignificant little animal that’s been blown way out of proportion.
4/10
H