Off With Their Heads
Kaiser Chiefs have a spring in their step on their third studio album, “Off With Their Heads.”
Thematically, the Brit quintet from Leeds have picked up where they left off with last year’s “Yours Truly, Angry Mob,” which satirized British youth culture for its incurious conformity and fleeting enthusiasms. Many of the songs on “Angry Mob” reinforced this theme with a dirgelike quality that is pleasantly absent here. Producer and DJ Mark Ronson must get some of the credit for injecting a new rhythmic density into the Kaiser Chiefs’ sound and de-emphasizing the marchlike beats that characterized some of the band’s earlier work.
A year or so of global pop success hasn’t unmuddled singer Ricky Wilson’s pronounced Midlands accent. Nor has his voice lost the essential new-wave keening that makes him sound forlorn and full of pep all at once. This comes across on “Can’t Say What I Mean,” a blistering punk-inflected anthem to the lovelorn and tongue-tied. The song kicks off with a bass-driven melody line that recalls Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Mr. Wilson sings, “Well nothing I said is so important/that it can’t be shortened/to fit on a badge.”
The album veers giddily into lyric inanity with “Tomato in the Rain,” adroitly introduced with a museum piece of a progressive rock intro by keyboardist Nicky “Peanut” Baines. “Like a tomato in the rain/I got that feeling again/Like a greyhound in a race/I’ve got a rabbit to chase,” Mr. Wilson sings.
His most ambitious vocal performance, however, is on the coolly syncopated rap-inspired track “Half the Truth,” a kind of talking vocal that builds into an angry full-throated chorus. The tapping cowbell and sputtering metal guitar signal that the track “Addicted to Drugs” is little more than a lark, transforming a familiar schoolyard play on Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love” into gleeful pop idolatry.
The 11-track album closes with the unexpectedly sweet “Remember You’re a Girl,” featuring drummer and principal songwriter Nick Hodgson with a reverb-enhanced bubble-gum pop vocal that’s just shy of treacly.
“Never Miss a Beat” sticks out as the obvious hit from “Off With Their Heads.” Released early as a single, it’s a mordantly funny call-and-response number in which a hapless interlocutor tries to pry loose conversation from a stubborn partner, leading to the refrain, “It’s cool to know nothing.”
Here and elsewhere, the Kaiser Chiefs emerge, weirdly, as generational scolds. When pop music is confrontational, it typically flatters its audience at the expense of those who are older and less cool. The Kaiser Chiefs are taking a different tack, making a success of serving up scorn alongside memorable hooks and danceable beats. That it’s working means either that fans don’t take it personally - or they aren’t listening to the words.
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