Kasabian’s Velociraptor! won’t be going extinct soon

By Bianca Pencz

4/5 records

Following up one of the best albums of 2009, West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum, Kasabian had their work cut out for them. And when Velociraptor! was first announced, a lot was promised within the exclamation point alone.

The album obviously tries to please everyone. It throws a bone to the crowd still in love with the band’s soundtrack-esque electronica, and a bone to fans of their recent psychedelic madness.

In fact, sometimes it’s downright messy about what it throws where, but that’s to be expected from the primitive beast it is at its core.

The title track is a song written entirely by the id. You can almost hear the football hooligans bawling, “Tuuuune!” But no fan of good old-fashioned rock ‘n’ roll should be able to resist Tom Meighan’s vowel-heavy inflections: “Veh-law-si-RAP-TUH!”

Album highlight “Switchblade Smiles” is one prolonged electro-rock orgasm, its overlayer of screaming, pseudo-rap, and processed sex-noises only making its successful execution more remarkable.

Kasabian’s gift for melody is what makes it so easy to forgive their habit of dumbing themselves down, of relying on rock tropes to fill in the gaps, in service of a tuuuune.

Mishaps appear when homage borderlines impersonation. See the druggy “La Fée Verte” (or “luh fee vair” en Franglais), which can’t seem to transcend its Fab Four fetish. There are tracks that, as high as the band members might have been at the time of writing them, come out half-baked.

Ultimately, the band hasn’t crumbled under the pressure of living up to themselves. How they didn’t quite manage it won’t bother them — their heads are probably too far in the clouds by now to care.