Album Review: Kasabian – Happenings
3 min read
Leicester’s most famous sons (Sorry Gary Lineker) return to lavish us with their eighth studio album, Happenings. The band has been through some changes over the years since they exploded onto the scene in 1997, with original band members, Chris Karloff and (more notably) Tom Meighan, leaving for a variety of creative and personal reason in 2007 and 2020 respectively. The musical direction of the band for Happenings was said to be inspired by the psychedelic wave of 1960s, with the tracks, recorded during touring of previous album The Alchemist’s Euphoria, looking to be a collection of big tunes with an upbeat feeling running throughout… let’s see if it hit their brief!!
Kicking off with their most recent single release, Darkest Lullaby has more than a hint of Santa Esmeralda’s Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood to the instrumentation, in an otherwise pleasant enough track, though I do find Sergio Pizzorno’s vocals lacking that star power that Kasabian’s monster hits have. Following on, Call uses a lot of synths and deep bass notes, with a Justice feel to it, a lot like a natural evolution from the material from their first, self-titled album, and this is contrasted by Coming Back to Me Good, which has those elements of psychedelic rock that the band was said to be inspired by. On the poppier side (I keep on hearing Hard Fi’s Hard To Beat in the track), this style is not continued in the subsequent punk-edged How Far Will You Go which is all guitars and distortions – if this isn’t the best track on the album, it’s in the top two, the other being next track, G.O.A.T, which has a pounding beat and excellent vocals in this slower hard (in a good way) track.
Passengers starts off the second half of the album slowly, but builds into a solid pop rock track, and is followed by the house-inspired Hell of It, but neither track has anything about them to make them feel like any more than a filler track on an album, and my feeling is replicated for tracks Italian Horror, which has a generic pop rock feel to it, and Bird in a Cage, which feels like it has poor production value to it, and it also feels a bit confused as to what it’s meant to be. The final track on the album is also Kasabian’s first release, Algorithms – which has anthemic qualities to it, though I feel that the vocals leave me feeling a bit flat at Happenings conclusion.
Well… it’s not Kasabian’s worst album by a long stretch, and there are definitely a couple of tracks that are nailed on to be added to future set lists (post Happenings album tour)… but I must confess, for me this isn’t a memorable Kasabian album for the most part – quite a few of the tracks are just a bit poppy and lack an edge (also, many tracks I found myself saying ‘this sounds like such and such’). When they do get it right, it’s a delight to listen to, but sadly I feel that those moments are fleeting on this occasion… quality tracks are not so much “Happenings”, but more ‘rare occurrences’.
