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Kaiser Chiefs - Off With Their Heads



Kaiser Chiefs - Off With Their Heads review


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   Guardian
In which The Likely Lads who became The Angry Mob mutate into The Fab Five: Off With Their Heads is Kaiser Chiefs discovering a sense of adventure. 'Like it Too Much' twins gothic synths with symphonic brush-strokes courtesy of Bond arranger David Arnold, while 'Half the Truth' mixes psychedelic organ with rapper Sway – an improbable combination but one they pull off, just. There's more experimentalism on 'Addicted to Drugs', which fuses verses that recall Big Audio Dynamite's 'Medicine Show' to a chorus that paraphrases Robert Palmer's 'Addicted to Love'.

Released a scant 18 months after their second album, it inevitably falls back on the Leeds lads default setting in places. 'Always Happens Like That', with backing vocals from Lily Allen, is most like the toddler-pleasing Kaisers of 'I Predict a Riot', with recent single 'Never Miss a Beat' dusting off the familiar vertiginous 'woahs' that wowed many an arena-sized moshpit. But mostly band and co-producer Mark Ronson have done what both parties needed to do in late 2008: avoid the ordinary and obvious, namely glossy stadium-indie and retro-soul horns respectively, and aim for the extraordinary. They manage it on unexpectedly lovely final song 'Remember You're a Girl', sung by drummer Nick Hodgson and glowing with Seventies singer-songwriter vibes....full text

   Uncut
Any band that’s shifted four million albums, filled football stadiums and been invited to Downing Street should probably expect it, but the Kaiser Chiefs do seem to attract virulent hatred from a certain brand of indie-rock purist. Partly it’s their age (like Franz Ferdinand and Hard-Fi, the Kaisers have one failed band under their belts and are all in their thirties). Partly it’s their relentlessly jolly demeanour (the waistcoats and trilbys, the end-of-the-pier stageshows, the wisecracking press conferences). Partly it’s the suspicion that they’ve spent their career ripping off Blur (in their initial incarnation as Parva they sounded like Blur in their Pavement phase; debut album Employment sounded like Blur in their Parklife phase; Yours Truly, Angry Mob borrowed from The Great Escape).

But mainly it’s because the Kaiser Chiefs seem utterly incapable of making songs that aren’t infuriatingly catchy, packed with anthemic, shout-along choruses, earworm keyboard riffs and lyrical couplets that quickly work their way into your subconscious. In an indie world that valorises shabbiness and insouciance, the Kaisers craftsmanship and charm leads them to be dismissed as craven populists with a desperate desire to be loved; a bunch of grammar school kids who lack not only the pigheaded swagger of a Gallagher but also the art-pop pretensions of their beloved Blur....full text

   Rolingstaones
The Kaiser Chiefs are Britain's most political pop group at the moment, although it may be hard to tell. There are no big-headline issues, no sides to take on the British band's third album. The power struggles boiling over in Andrew White's melodic-garage guitars and the chant-along choruses led by singer Ricky Wilson are mostly everyday boy-girl theater and pub-crawl routine. One song, "Can't Say What I Mean," is a hot blitz, with curdled organ and fat, crusty guitar, about being tongue-tied. The nagging hook in "Never Miss a Beat" is blissful ignorance in a nutshell: "It's cool to know nothing." Which, of course, it isn't. The Kaiser Chiefs, who hail from England's industrial north midlands, are definitely at war — with lethargy and the energy wasted on junk culture and hangover recovery — and while they are no closer to victory than they were on 2005's Employment or 2007's Yours Truly, Angry Mob, Off With Their Heads is great British pop in the dynamic lethal-irony tradition of the mid-Sixties Kinks, the early Jam and, with that vintage-New Wave tone of Nick Baines' keyboards, XTC's 1979 album, Drums and Wires. As songwriters, Wilson, White, Baines, bassist Simon Rix and drummer Nick Hodgson make kicks that last — the saucy-disco strut of "Good Days Bad Days," the brisk downhill-chords hook in "Half the Truth" — but also kick back. The deceit in "Half the Truth" seems like cartoon-spy stuff until Wilson hits the chorus, which sounds like the last eight years of Dubya ("I will not lie to you/But I definitely only gave you half the truth"). And you can hear in "Always Happens Like That," underneath the cocky Blur-via-Small Faces cheer, that cynical cycle of favor so many British bands are forced to endure: "And we made a vow/To the holy cow/And we set it up/Just to knock it down." The Kaiser Chiefs, one of the U.K.'s most popular bands right now, may get their share of lashes someday. They won't take it lying down...full text

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