One, take control of me? You're messing with the enemy

Continuing my trip back through the 2005 album charts.

23/01/05 : Kasabian - Kasabian

This is another one I own and I remember liking it a lot, but I've not listened to it in years - and I'm not entirely sure why, so it will be interesting to see if there's any reason for it.

Nope - no idea at all. This is very decent album with a particularly strong opening stretch - "Club Foot" is an excellent opener being one of those tracks that one everyone knows without recognising it from the title (a bit like "L.S.F." which pops up later on).  This is followed up by "Processed Beats" which has a nice psychedelic tinge to it and then you have "Reason Is Treason" which also a very strong track.  And whilst the album doesn't quite keep things at that level, it still maintains a decent quality level even having that rarest of things (for such bands anyway) - a good instrumental in the bizarrely named "Ovary Stripe".  It's all way more Beatlesesque than Oasis ever managed to be, despite their desperate posturing but updated with a baggy/electronic vibe -  all in all, a very decent debut album.

We're at #4 in the chart this week on their 20th week of a very decent 40 week run and it's managed 98 weeks on the chart in total, with it last being seen in '09 - but #4 was as high as it got, on three occasions.  The rest of the top five were The Killers, Scissor Sisters, Green Day and Franz Ferdinand which makes for a very decent top top five indeed and the highest new entry was obviously Ray Charles all the way down at #59 - although I'm also going to mention a re-entry for Thirteen Senses (#14) which is one of the better Coldplay clone efforts from the time and it's firmly etched in my memory because I remember listening to it when driving down the freeway just outside LA at night in the pouring rain and being absolutely petrified!

Wikipedia tells us this is their only album not to make #1 (out of seven) and they had a load of fun with the colours of the covers, with black & red, black & blue, silver & white and glow-in-the-dark versions being available in different regions.  The critics were mostly nice enough about it with them all falling over themselves to describe the various influences, although Rolling Stone rather harshly opine that they "make the mistake of trying to be revolutionary by quoting revolutionaries" which sounds like a phrase the critic had dreamt up and was desperate to use whether it was relevant or not.  Commercially, it only really did anything here and in Ireland (a totally expected #22) and Japan (a very peculiar #17) although it did get to #94 in the US, which is crowded market for this kind of thing (and all other things as well!).

"Customers also listened to" Kaiser Chiefs, The Libertines, Oasis and Hard-fi - yeah, not a million miles away.  I think this is a very decent album though and feels like it deserves more listens than I've given it over the years.

16/01/05 - Another enjoyable revisit
30/01/05 - A very decent album