Friday 5 September 2008

Pop review: Kasabian, Academy, Newcastle

Kasabian have been in the tidings recently after booking 20 hotel suite for their mates at the Creamfields festival, and the discovery that guitar player Serge Pizzorno has been sharing his back garden with an unexploded bomb. Drummer Ian Matthews has augmented his kit with a gigantic gong and the band have recently grown so much whisker that it could material pillows for a dozen families. This festival warm up is a relatively cozy gig for a band who derriere fill Earls Court twice over, merely vocalist Tom Meighan treats it like Wembley arena. "Are you alright at the back?" he asks, often. He even "conducts" the crowd's singing into sections like a consort.












There's a lot of singing at Kasabian gigs. Their songs - enormous chanted choruses with juddering rhythms - are often simple in construction only have managed to locate the private nerve midpoint which makes human beings sing along while hurling a plastic beer field glass in the air. While they've been away working on their third album, the band's sound has - if anything - got tied bigger. Oldies like Shoot the Runner and Processed Beats now sound like Pizzorno's garden UXB has been grafted into the rhythm section.

And the raw songs unveiled suggest this isn't around to change. Fire - which sounds like a glam rock Hokey Cokey and actually includes the line "escape from it to the left hand" - is only seconds old when those custody shoot back up in the air. It's sure as shooting only a matter of time in front the band start taking to the stage in tanks.







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