Music

Since we’re going to be constantly confronted with these songs wherever we choose to turn or hide over the next 18 months, let’s not waste time here talking about the music (for the record, it’s still competent, cartoon hook-laden Rag Week indie of the Blur-circa-‘The Great Escape’ variety). No, the burning issue surrounding the release of Kaiser Chiefs’ second album seems to be less whether it’s actually any good, more whether the people who created it are ‘not indie’, ‘sellouts’ and ‘careerists’.

This, apparently, is still important, both to people who paradoxically spent the latter half of last year buying all those Kooks/Razorlight/Automatic albums, and equally to Ricky Wilson and co themselves. In recent interviews – clad in regulation ‘We’re dead serious now!’ black coats – the band have waxed sagacious about the musical and personal journeys they’ve been on, and how these have informed their grown-up second album, while still being at pains to reassure their public that despite coming of age, they will never ‘turn into Coldplay’. Whatever that means. In reality, the Kaisers’ much trumpeted ‘maturity’ ultimately amounts to little more than their guitars being turned up a bit. Helpfully, too, when trying to ascertain how they view themselves in the context of modern British guitar music, they’ve also written a song called ‘Everything Is Average Nowadays’.

The bottom line though, for the less ludicrously deluded among us, is that All Tomorrow's Parties can sit this one out but the people who put videos on those big screens in Top Shop should be primed and ready to go.

‘Yours Truly, Angry Mob’, equipped with 13 daytime Radio 1-pummeling choruses (well, 12, if you discount the, er, ‘heartfelt’ Nick Hodgson-sung ditty ‘Boxing Champ’) and plenty of the cumbersome clever-cleverness with which the Kaisers made their name ('There are many things that I would be proud of if I’d only invented them,’ goes the closing ‘Retirement’, ‘such as the wheel, the washing machine and the tumble dryer’) is a depressing representation of what is these days considered alternative. ‘This should be a thrill,’ Ricky Wilson sings on ‘Thank You Very Much’, ‘but it feels like a drill.’ Never a truer word spoken, (not so) young man.