Consider the quality of recent Kasabian releases and head back to their original. The band has battered their sound into oblivion by sticking close to their guns and playing it safe. Their self-titled debut is no different to the bile and tired tones of their upcoming record, Happenings. Where this comes from is in the fear of affecting their fans too much – the bucket hat wearers who have grown up with Bonfire as a soundtrack to their youth and, like Kasabian or Two Door Cinema Club, do not want to remember much else than the nostalgia pops of watching The Inbetweeners. You can get the same experience looking at those UK Memes pages on Twitter and like those “who remembers this,” clickbait posts, Kasabian lingers in the mind now as a compartmentalised slice of the times.
Through their work youth returns and in doing this a lack of maturity presents itself. It is not like Kasabian had lyrical prowess at their disposal. Their loud songs were filled with guitar work which could consume the room if played loud enough and as a result, less focus was on their lack of lyrical triumph. Let’s not mince words. You are here for the hits and nothing more. It is why their opener, Club Foot, is so well-remembered. Look at what was to come. The likes of Reason is Treason and Processed Beats are, well, as the latter title describes, manufactured with the fallout of the UK indie scene in mind. Club Foot still lingers as an early 2010s bit of static, a piece which survived six years before being implemented into football culture and surviving like a parasite on other forms of culture.
This is Kasabian through and through. It is how they live and thrive in an environment which does not benefit their sound any longer, hence why their recent efforts are dwindling at best. Cheap thrills and stuffy stylings make up the most of Kasabian, a debut album troubled by its tempo. Neither fast enough to endure on the floor of some sticky club, the location Kasabian hopes to be on this effort, nor slow enough to engage their potential lyrical qualities. Perhaps this is for the best as Test Transmission proves an ultimately empty experience of freed chickens and knightly ambitions. But the primitive imagery Kasabian creates is shuffled away, the instrumental spectacles not given the chance to grow despite desperately clawing for some sense of impact from track to track. No such luck though and instead Tom Meighan conforms to the clunky scene expectations of the time, and he never shook those off.
Leftover scraps of late-stage Oasis and a little more at its best, Kasabian lingers as an instrumentally interesting band with little space to grow it. This is the great frustration with the band and it is a genuine shame they did not pursue this growing sound. Instead, they play it safe and have done so for the better part of two decades now. Their self-titled debut is the sound they still hold yet scrappier and ropier than it was before because their influences have dried up and their expectations of the crowd are lowered to a point where name recognition overtakes anything the band will or won’t do. They are beyond scrutiny because their audience is big enough to avoid it. Listen in to Kasabian again and hear the cracks of their work form. Kasabian is at its breaking point now, but they started there and discarded their potential interests.
