The Beat Surrender

The Kaiser Chiefs had set themselves a monumental challenge in following up their excellent and much loved (by both fans and media alike) debut album, Employment. It didn’t change the face of world music and it hasn’t used a blueprint that others before them also haven’t borrowed previously.

What it did do though was set Leeds alight as a musical city, which can now boast bands such as The Pigeon Detectives, Sunshine Underground, The Hair, Shut Your Eyes And You’ll Burst Into Flames and Dead Disco. As well as that they have helped take anthemic indie with balls back into the mainstream, it’s ok for Coldplay and Keane to dominate things but lets be honest they aren’t a band that lads can sing along to in a drunken stupor on a Saturday night are they.

Despite all the success and attention from the first album, it was felt by many that the Kaisers were nothing more than chancers who got lucky with their timing, as guitar music once again started to head towards the top of the charts along with bands like Franz Ferdinand and The Killers. While this might be true to a degree in that every band needs an element of luck with the timing of things, they were a band that had earned their dues over a number of years before finally hitting the right combination.

This nagging feeling did leave you wondering though how they would go on following up such a brash debut, could they match it commercially and more importantly could they match it for consistency and quality over a second album coming less than two years after the first?

When I first played Yours Truly, Angry Mob my initial answer would have been a very definite no to either of those points. Ok so Ruby had hit number one so they were bound to sell copies initially, but I couldn’t see them sustaining it and I couldn’t see where the next singles were coming from. However between that first play and me sitting down to review the album now i’ve probably played the album a good ten times and it’s that age old story with really good albums…it’s a definite grower.

It gets stronger every time I listen to it, to a point where i’d consider Ruby one of the weakest tracks on the album along with Try Your Best, the more you listen to it the more the potential future singles start to jump out at you as well. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see them release Heat Dies Down, Everything Is Average Nowadays or the sort of title track The Angry Mob, a song that really picks up in the second half.

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