Kasabian – Velociraptor! Review

Yawning or screaming? It is up to the listener to figure out what the open-mouthed art of Velociraptor!, the fourth Kasabian album, is doing. For those who have heard their previous collections of noise, it is firmly in the latter, wide-open fatigue of their sound. Yet they go on. Let’s Roll Like We Used To makes it clear even the band is aware of a dip in form from their lacklustre original to the numb West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum. From wannabe Oasis mugs to the shatter of their dreams and an idealist attempt to be The Libertines with out-there lyrical assumptions. Yet they lack the imagery to be either and instead fall into a trap of awkwardly placed neo-psychedelia. Velociraptor! is their most interesting yet futile work to date because, after three dense albums of talentless dreck, anything vaguely listenable is a mighty triumph.  

Acceptable foot-tapping opener Let’s Just Roll Like We Used To may call back for a time of quality which never existed for Kasabian, but why let reality stand in the way of an attempted overhaul of their sound? Yet the good faith we can put into this opening track is reduced by the spaghetti western-like cries of Days Are Forgotten. In just five minutes it drifts from possibly engaging to growling alley cat. The hopes of possible interest go to die just two songs in for Kasabian and Velociraptor! does little to try and recover from there. Goodbye Kiss is the panicked nonsense of a man failing to meet a studio deadline. Broken wrists and saying hello with binary opposite kisses goodbye are backed by the same tools of reductive string momentum, a cheap way of trying to kick on with instrumental range. Do not fall for it. It’s as empty as the rest of Kasabian’s efforts. What Velociraptor! suffers from is self-belief. Nobody sat Kasabian down to tell them their songs were insufferable. 

From the obvious, clawing attempts at injecting their empty lyrics with emotion merely by adding strings over the top of them to the circus clown freakout of La Fee Verte because a French title on an indie album means there is a whiff of cultural mechanics at play, and not just fodder for the pub jukebox attached to forgettable album songs. The Beatles are referenced plainly and without any sense of what it means to the band or how it has conditioned their music, it is just there because Oasis, their influencers, did it before them. They have sent themselves down the river for they have nothing interesting to present their listeners, nothing unique bar the unsettling ease at which they produce familiar, comfortable listens for those who fear musical challenge. Wasteful bits like plain sex and money-loving Acid Turkish Bath (Shelter from the Storm) summarises Kasabian well, a band without a sense of connection to the real-world chasing shags, booze and sniff.  

Fundamentally flawed but its title gives it away. Fossilised influences chipped away by the wannabe archaeologists Kasabian become, digging a shallow grave for their sound and content to lie there as fans throw flowers into what would not turn out to be their final resting place. No, they would kick on from there. A zombified model, a husk of what they were with no history to them. A bit like Rangers FC, but with more reliance on alternative dance than rejected Championship footballers. An embarrassing collection of tracks which hear Kasabian get too big for their boots with a thumping instrumental collection which feels ripped from The Hoosiers or some ill-forgotten indie band of the mid-2000s. Uninteresting flounder from a band who believes name-dropping The Beatles and keeping some strange, hanger-on troubadour vocal presence is enough to conjure interest. They were wrong then and remain incorrect.  

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