Artist: Kaiser Chiefs
Label: Polydor Records
Release: 2007
Kaiser Chiefs, a great name for a new brand of Austrian doughnuts! No joke! They’re sweet as a doughnut and MTV loves them. With a pinch of scandalous cheek, and otherwise playfully innocent looks hiding the notorious spirit of street hooliganism that their predecessors The Clash once brought to the stage. But these new lads from Leeds can be anything. Even the target of Blur frontman David Albarn’s anger, who reckons “Yours Truly, Angry Mob” draws its inspiration from the Blur album “The Great Escape” (1995). Hold on, hold on, Mr. Penitent Albarn. If we keep going like this, we can knock Blur off their pedestal when it comes to copying in no time. The funniest part is that the boss of Blur, who are waking up again in 2007, recently publicly dissed his own body of work, saying “The Great Escape” is one of two Blur albums that came from his pen and that are rubbish. So why on earth would Kaiser Chiefs copy it?
Back to Kaiser Chiefs, then. After the huge commercial success of “Employment” (2005), the lads promised themselves they’d stay in the spotlight and try to cement their status. So “Yours Truly, Angry Mob” plays it safe, leaning heavily on the band’s debut, deftly riding the kind of pop rock we nowadays label a mix of post-punk revival and Britpop elements (ugh, how vague, but it can’t be helped)!
Despite all the pseudo-scientific, holier-than-thou justifications of the general bitterness that the jealous press is so full of, these guys come across as professional and totally convincing. No doubt about it once you pop the disc into the CD player. They deliver tracks that present the Great Britain of the new millennium’s take on pop rock in the best possible light. Arena-minded, singalong choruses made up of just a few words, or simply melodically drawn-out “Oh-oh-oh-oh” lines (Hyghroyds). Simple! Greedy. The crowds under the stage will be theirs with ease! A poker hand of aces, masterfully played! This is an album for all the “uncultured”, for all the anti-gourmets who have no time for dissecting content and hunting for biblical prophecies inside some potential rock-music perfection supposedly stemming from elementary complexity. The language of Kaiser Chiefs is simple, short, concise, and it hits the cerebral cortex with dangerous contagiousness. Ruby, which has meanwhile become a big hit, carries a properly erogenous, clip-clopping rhythm that sets your body into a spontaneous sway before you even properly realize when it started. Here the guitar of semi-acoustic, playful open riffs is nicely balanced with a “honky tonk” piano and of course Ricky’s front-and-center vocal, which was born for everything Kaiser Chiefs have to offer. A song superbly dressed up for a big hit.
Kaiser Chiefs know how to build varied motifs. They glue them together so that the songs have a common thread and a high degree of fluidity. “Yours Truly, Angry Mob” is therefore a seriously dynamic record that spins through its running time in a flash. What’s more, you’ll struggle to find a single song with the sort of deliberate “filler” that bands use today to pad out an album’s length while offering nothing. The only thing breaking the otherwise consistent evenness of the tracks is the mellow Love’s Not A Competition (But I’m Winning), which suggests these guys feel far more at home in a pub than in a blooming meadow sentimentally sniffing May flowers. On the other hand, they’re born for writing straight-up rock directness, which is what Everything Is Averaged Nowdays, Heat Lies Down, Angry Mob, Hyghroyds and Learnt My Lesson Well deliver, and the already mentioned Ruby for sure, while the closing Retirement deserves a special mention, bringing a chorus that sounds like Depeche Mode wrote it around the time of “Violator”, only with the electronics stripped out and guitar riffs put in their place.
Kaiser Chiefs know how to handle minimalism. They handle it so deftly that they combine it with simplicity in a way that magnifies their expression to the max. That’s not easy. There’s a danger of repeating themselves. The band’s third album really ought to bring some genre deviation from the first two. It would be desirable, though not essential, if the band keeps managing to hammer out hits cut from the same cloth as Ruby. Kaiser Chiefs passed the test with the new album with flying colors. They stayed in the spotlight, stayed on MTV and once again cheekily shook up the top of the charts. The US breakthrough is still missing. “Yours Truly, Angry Mob” also confirms that it’s possible to fight today’s big-label politics, where they plan the success story carefully ahead: the artist releases an album with a mega hit, but the follow-up exposes all their artistic immaturity, and the parent labels are to blame too, since they stop caring about the band, as there are as many potential candidates bringing in fresh profit out on the street as there are leaves and blades of grass. And the masses love new faces. No! With “Yours Truly, Angry Mob” Kaiser Chiefs prove they’re an extremely high-quality quintet who, at the right moment, didn’t let anyone down! So let’s enjoy an excellent, easygoing, naughtily sweet pop rock record that can be spun several times in a row, at any moment and on all sorts of occasions in any CD player. Despite all the superlatives used in this review, given today’s commercial pop rock trends, it’s an open question whether anyone will still remember the record in ten years.
Line-up
Ricky Wilson – vocals
Andrew White – guitar
Nick Baines – keyboards
Simon Rix – bass guitar
Nick Hodgson – drums
Production
Stephen Street
Tracklist
1. Ruby
2. The Angry Mob
3. Heat Dies Down
4. High Royds
5. Love Is Not A Competition (But I’m Winning)
6. Thank You Very Much
7. I Can Do Without You
8. My Kind Of Guy
9. Everything Is Average Nowadays
10. Boxing Champ
11. Learnt My Lesson Well
12. Try Your Best
13. Retirement
Album length: 44.42
